


the miseducation of gideon nav

by strangehunger



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Canon-Typical Humor, Co-Parenting, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Flirting, Friends to Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Group Projects From Hell, Sharing a Bed, Shenanigans, Sleepovers, Slow Burn, Underage Drinking, everything seems like the end of the world when you’re 17
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-01-23 18:29:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21324697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangehunger/pseuds/strangehunger
Summary: Home economics. Gideon had, rather wrongfully, determined that this might be one of the few classes that might actually teach her something useful about the world. Taxes, resumes, the kind of boring things that might eventually carry her into that mythical realm of adulthood that her teachers were constantly on her case about. So far, she had learned how to gouge her finger up trying to sew a button onto a coat, and she had learned that if you fucked up really badly, a cute girl might band-aid it up for you.Home ec taught Gideon another vital life rule, just minutes later: life isn’t fair.Because Harrowhark Nonagesimus was holding a baby.__________________________________________________________________________In which Gideon Nav — high school junior, lady-killer, rugby star extraordinaire — finds herself raising a (creepy, possibly haunted) baby doll with her greatest enemy, Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Between trying not to fail the class, kill one another, or inflict lasting childhood trauma on a robot, the two might just end up closer than either of them had ever imagined.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 57
Kudos: 264





	1. life isn’t fair.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is an ongoing work that has been a product of the wonderfully supportive Gideon the Ninth fandom. I can’t take credit for the idea — I have to thank my sister, [Cheyanne](%E2%80%9Cdecalexas.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D), for saying, “I want to see Gideon and Harrow raising a flour bag baby together,” and then letting me run with it, and then also being a fabulous beta. It’s been a ton of fun writing these kids having a normal, stupid high school experience, and to maybe live a little vicariously through them. Thank you so much to Lindsay, too, for taking time to beta read as well, for hyping me up during the writing process, and for naming this thing when I had no idea. 
> 
> And finally, thanks to the amazing Gideon the Ninth discord server! So many talented and friendly and supportive people in there, I know quite a few of you have read bits of this and said nice things about it, so thank you to all of you as well! 
> 
> Currently a WIP, I have the first few chapters done and most of it outlined, but it probably won’t be on the most consistent posting schedule — I’m just excited to get this out and share it with all of you. Please feel free to talk to me on tumblr at [strangehunger](%E2%80%9Cstrangehunger.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D)!

Harrowhark Nonagesimus was holding a baby.

There were a million other things that Gideon Nav would have expected to see in Harrow’s bony clutches. A human skull, perhaps? The crumpled remains of some innocent creature? A knife, maybe, pointed directly at Gideon’s carotid artery?

The last thing she would have expected to see would have been a _ baby_. The only person less qualified to be toting one of those around would be Gideon herself, which was why when Harrow extended the thing toward her, dangling it by its hand from between two fingers as if disgusted by its mere presence, Gideon said, “Nah, I’m good.”

Harrow’s bony face closed in on itself; her mouth pinched together into an angry line that seemed to disappear into the pallid, corpse-like skin of her face. With a flick of her hand, she released the baby and the world spun into slow motion; Gideon, prepared by years of rugby practice, dove for the doll on instinct. 

Her heroism was in vain. Gideon caught the baby by the leg, but not before the empty plastic of the head smacked into the ground. The doll released an ear gratingly robotic scream. Gideon wasn’t sure what was worse — the thought of Harrow dropping an actual, living baby onto the cruel linoleum of the hallway floor (something she was absolutely capable of), or the repetitive shrieks that echoed through the hallway. 

Above her head, Harrow scoffed. 

“You can’t just _ drop _ her—”

“_It, _” Harrow replied coldly. She hovered in the hallway just outside of their classroom, her face a perpetual mask of annoyance. From atop her lofty pedestal of egoism, she stared down at Gideon like something particularly nasty that had just been peeled from her shoe. “And if you had just taken it…”

Gideon attempted to bundle the doll into a position that would end the screaming. Trying to stifle it in the crook of her elbow did little; if anything, it seemed to make the electronic shrieking worse. Harrow’s impassive gaze darted from the baby doll’s face to Gideon’s as if she were uncertain which one she would like to smother first. Gideon would have gladly been the first to go, except the desire to high tail it out of this situation through any means possible was second only to the fact that she wouldn’t give Harrow the satisfaction of dying at her hands. 

That being said, Gideon was fairly suspicious that she had already died and taken a straight shot to Hell, so what did she have left to lose? 

If someone had told her ten years ago — Hell, if someone had told her_ two hours ago _—that she and Harrowhark Nonagesimus would be raising a baby together, Gideon would have laughed until a rib snapped. Now, with a screaming baby doll practically jammed into her own armpit and a frowning Harrow bearing down on her, Gideon just felt like crying. 

Gideon should have seen this coming. A mere fifty minutes earlier, she had artfully dropped into the seat next to Coronabeth Tridentarius, nearly taking out her own kneecap trying to beat Naberius Tern to that coveted seat. Coronabeth had laughed at that, her smile breaking across her face like a ray of sunshine, and patted Gideon’s hand. 

After dying a small death of shock at that, Gideon had leaned back, drummed her fingers against a notebook more replete with idle doodles than actual writing, and watched the class fill out, congratulating herself on her foolproof plan. 

Home economics. Gideon had, rather wrongfully, determined that this might be one of the few classes that might actually teach her something useful about the world. Taxes, resumes, the kind of boring things that might eventually carry her into that mythical realm of adulthood that her teachers were constantly on her case about. So far, she had learned how to gouge her finger up trying to sew a button onto a coat, and she had learned that if you fucked up _ really _ badly, a cute girl might band-aid it up for you.

Home ec taught Gideon another vital life rule, just minutes later: _ life isn’t fair. _

Gideon had plotted this meticulously. Edging Naberius out had left Gideon sitting on top of premium real estate. Second seat over, second row to the back, and Gideon was in the perfect spot to be paired up with Corona, should their decrepit professor instruct them to partner with the classmate next to them. And should he make them count off, making a pair of every other person? Dulcinea Septimus, the fawn haired senior who knew how to pull Gideon’s strings with just the crook of a finger. Foolproof. 

At the front of the rooms had been a pile of baby dolls that was both gruesome and hilarious in its effect. The assignment? The crowning misery of the term, a grueling, two week long co-parenting exercise with a baby doll that looked better suited to a horror film than a high school hallway. Gideon had seen juniors and seniors carting the things around and cooing at them for the last couple of years, dreading that point late in the second semester when the halls were filled with the discordant howls of robotic infants. 

The exercise was, in Gideon’s opinion, pure sadism. After her attempt at excusing herself from the assignment with a rather well thought out argument of, “_But I’m gay,” _had failed, Gideon had cooked up a better plan. If she was going to spend two weeks losing sleep over a screeching monstrosity of wire and doll parts, she was going to do so with one of the hottest girls in school. 

As Harrow screwed her face up in disdain, wiping her hand off on her jeans as though the baby doll were diseased (which, fair point, it very well could have been — God only knew how many classes had gone through the same dolls), Gideon mourned the fact that she had been defeated by the _ alphabet. _

_ Nav, _ their geriatric teacher, far better suited for either a bedpan or a grave than a classroom, had read with boredom. By the time he had come to _ N _ in the alphabet, Gideon had already gone through the first two stages of grief, and was ready to bargain. When the teacher had passed over her waving hand and said, in a disinterested voice, _ and Nonagesimus_, Gideon plummeted into the final stage: Depression. 

When it was evident that Gideon, catatonic with shock, was not going to come to claim the baby from the grotesque pile of its peers at the front of the room, Harrowhark had set her bony, black clad shoulders and walked to the front of the room to collect it, sweeping slowly through the room like a plague through an unsuspecting country. On her way back, she fixed Gideon with a cool gaze. If looks could kill, Gideon would have already been hacked up and decomposing in the landfill. 

Harrow fixed her with that same look now, as she handed (or, more accurately _ dropped _) the baby off to Gideon. 

“What do you want _ me _ to do with it?” Gideon asked. 

“Shake it,” said Harrow, imperious voice cold as a mausoleum, “As your parents should have done to you.” 

And then she stalked away down the hall, leaving Gideon standing alone with a screaming baby doll, like an asshole.

* * *

“It’s hideous.” 

“Yeah, well, _ she,” _Gideon emphasized, because she, despite being philosophically against imposing gender roles on newly minted human beings, wanted to inject some humanity into the situation, “takes after her mother.”

Camilla paused. Her steely gaze moved passively from the baby’s face to Gideon’s, her silence far louder than any words could be. 

“Her _ other _mother, dickhead.”

In another life, Camilla might have been a librarian, demure and precise and orderly. In this one, she was a lean powerhouse that knew how to play dirty, with the kind of BDE that could take down people twice her size. She tossed her head back, wiping a sweaty lock of cool brown hair from her face, and took a swig off her water bottle. 

Gideon turned her eyes back to where the baby doll sat, swaddled in a garish school spirit blanket that Gideon had excavated from the depths of the gymnasium’s lost-and-found bin. It was propped up on the bleachers, staring across the fields with a cold gleam in its vacant eyes. She had been lucky enough to get it to stop screaming by the time rugby practice rolled around, and it had been patiently waiting on the bleachers ever since. 

With a sigh, Gideon threw herself back against the green grass of the practice field. Above, a blue sky bore down on her, a friendly reminder of the summer to come. Even that could not lift her spirits; instead, she thought darkly about spending the rest of the term fighting tooth and nail with Harrowhark Nonagesimus, instead of having idyllic picnics with Corona under the spring sun. 

“It’s so hard being a single mother,” Gideon moaned, flinging an arm over her eyes. 

“Just give it to Nonagesimus every other day.”

“What, so she can eat it?” Propping herself up on her elbows, Gideon raised one eyebrow at Camilla. “So she can harvest its organs for black market sale? So she can traumatize it with acts of psychological warfare?”

“It’s plastic, Nine.”

“That’s my _ daughter_,” Gideon said, voice rising in mock affront. “I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter. Whatever she can do to fuck me over, she will.”

A whistle sounded from across the field, and Camilla pushed herself up off the grass to follow it. “Maybe you should give her the benefit of the doubt. 

With a snort, Gideon followed Camilla up. Camilla, better than anyone, should understand the ruthlessness that was contained within the tiny body of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Harrow would have pushed Camilla’s cousin into oncoming traffic if it mean she could secure the much disputed role of valedictorian. A sudden joint project wasn’t going to provide her with a reason to make amends for the years of vicious rivalry and bullying. The only change of heart Harrow was capable of was a heart attack, and then again, only if Gideon got _ really _lucky. 

The doll spent the rest of the evening screaming. Eventually, Gideon smothered it in a bundle of blankets and relegated it to the bottom of the closet, where she had half a mind to leave it for the next two weeks, grade on the project be damned.

If she was going to fail, at least she would be taking Harrow down with her. 

* * *

The last time Gideon Nav had willingly sat by Harrowhark Nonagesimus had been in kindergarten. 

Even then, _ willing _was not necessarily an apt term; they had been forced together by proximity of their names. A testament to her genius, Harrow had been able to spell her own ridiculous name by the age of five. It had barely fit on the name tag at the front of her desk, spelled out in the cramped, wobbly handwriting of a child. The first draft of Gideon’s name tag had been a rough drawing of a rocket taking off from a field of zombies, and the second had been made under teacher supervision. 

How simple those early days had been, when sharing a crayon had been enough to strike up a friendship! For nearly a year, the two had been inseparable. Harrow, scrawny and sickly even as a child, had trailed the older, taller Gideon like a dark satellite orbiting a greater sun. Where Gideon could be seen in the far reaches of the playground waving a stick around like a sword, Harrow was not much further, reclining under a tree with a book in her lap. One attempt at shaking the seating assignment up had resulted in big, fat tears rolling down the faces of two distraught six year olds. Gideon and Harrow had miraculously been seated together after that. 

Everything had changed in the second grade. 

Ten years later, Gideon couldn’t have said what had happened. Maybe there had been some juvenile squabble. Maybe it had been Gideon’s fault — she had a reputation for inserting her foot into her mouth whenever given the opportunity. Maybe Harrow had just had a change of heart. All Gideon knew was that one day, the seating assignment changed, and Harrow changed with it. Her friend, already a reserved, reclusive creature to all except Gideon, had grown cold as an arctic front, icing Gideon out as if she didn’t even exist. 

Ever the problem child, Gideon had not taken kindly to the newfound disinterest. Even as her circle of friends grew wider, expanding beyond the weird, small kid who had shadowed her for the past year, Gideon had found herself seeking Harrow out and pulling her metaphorical pigtails whenever possible. Each time, Harrow would simply wipe her hands of Gideon like a particularly nasty bug, expertly mingling indifference with repulsion.

Where Gideon was quick to jump, impulsively pushing at Harrow’s buttons to see which one would get a reaction, Harrow burned much slower. She knew when to strike, and where. She would ignore Gideon for weeks on end, surfacing only to dole out the occasional humiliation, or to crush Gideon’s dreams to the ground. It was Harrow’s gum that had made its way into Gideon’s long hair in the third grade — a blessing, really, since Gideon had been begging Aiglamene to cut it for years, but disgusting nonetheless. It was Harrow who had landed Gideon in the junior high detention hall whenever possible, imperiously dredging up any and all infraction on Gideon’s part to an already draconic principal. By extension, it was Harrow who had left Gideon with a record that barred Gideon from any sports tryouts in her freshman year of high school, fueling a year’s worth of lonely, rage-filled workouts that had propelled her to the team for sophomore year. 

Since the dawn of time, the two had hated one another — or, at least, since second grade, which seemed comparable in Gideon’s seventeen year old mind. 

For this reason, it was rather surreal even to Gideon herself when she dropped her backpack into the chair next to Harrow’s the following day. Harrow regarded it exactly as if Gideon had taken a massive dump on the grainy blue plastic. 

“What,” she said, in a voice sharp as razor wire, “are you doing.” It was not a question. It was an accusation. 

“Raising our child, apparently.” Just saying the words practically triggered Gideon’s gag reflex. Based on the way Harrow’s eyes narrowed, her irises a penetrating black darker even than her smudged eyeliner, she felt the same. To punctuate her point, Gideon drew the doll from her gym bag and dropped it on the desk. The smack it made would have been satisfying, had it not immediately set the stupid thing a-scream. 

“And doing exactly as well as I’d have imagined,” Harrow said drily. “Does it have brain damage yet?”

“Don’t listen to her, Princess,” Gideon told the doll, patting it on its back. “Your other mother is a hellacious bitch, with a heart that knows neither joy nor love.”

“That’s not true.” A beat passed. “I enjoy seeing you struggle.”

Gideon sneered at Harrow, who simply glared back. She idly bounced the baby around. She wasn’t sure _ why _she was supposed to do it, but she saw errant mothers doing it all the time out in the wild. 

“Good lord, Griddle, are you _ trying _ to kill it?”

“_Her_,” Gideon said, more out of habit than anything. She bounced the baby again, vigorously.

Harrow’s wraith-like little arms shot out; before Gideon knew what was happening, Harrow’s bony claws had fastened around the doll’s legs. 

“Have you never heard of shaken baby syndrome?” Harrow asked. 

“Oh, _ now _you want a say in her upbringing—”

“If _ it _were a real baby,” Harrow said, tugging on the legs, “it would be as brain dead as you are, if you keep shaking it like that.”

While Gideon clearly had the upper hand in strength and height, she had to admit that Harrow _ had _clawed her way out of hell, and therefore packed a surprising punch in her bony, petite frame. If Gideon lifted the doll high enough, maybe she would just take Harrow with it. The only thing that stopped her from following that strand of investigation was the fact that the only thing she needed less than Coronabeth Tridentarius seeing her lose a game of tug-of-war with a feral child the size of a Keebler elf was Dulcinea Septimus seeing her rip a baby in half. She released the doll, and Harrow nearly went toppling into the desk behind her with the sudden release of tension. 

The only thing that kept her in place was Gideon’s hand. Somehow, without permission from the brain that Harrow seemed to think Gideon lacked, Gideon’s arm had shot out, clutching Harrow’s sharp shoulder just before she could go flailing back into the chair. 

The two of them both froze. As did time itself. And probably Hell. 

Harrow’s head turned slowly. Instead of spinning 360 degrees, like Gideon would have expected it to, it stopped just as her eyes fell on Gideon’s large hand, a burst of color against the black of Harrow’s turtleneck._ A turtleneck_, Gideon found herself thinking. _ In April_.

Harrow shrugged her shoulder, and Gideon recoiled as if her hand had been burned. And her _ face_. 

In the midst of it all, the baby doll had stopped screaming. Harrow furtively pressed it against her board-like chest and turned away without another word, slipping into her chair in silence. She spent the remainder of the final few moments of the break clearly intensely interested in something happening just outside the classroom window. 

The thumping of her own heartbeat was enough to distract Gideon from whatever conversations were happening a few seats down, as Dulcinea Septimus cooed at the fake doll rocked between Palamedes Sextus’ scrawny arms. A couple of seats further down, Naberius Tern was attending to the baby doll he was meant to be sharing with Corona with the same fervor he would have applied to doing her laundry, had she deigned to give him the privilege. 

In fact, the only thing that drew Gideon from the pit of mortification that she had hurled herself into was the bombshell that their decrepit teacher dropped about five minutes into class. Not only did she have to deal with the incessant cacophony of robot babies shrieking at all hours of the day, but the things were also _ recording data _about their treatment, like some kind of dystopian nightmare. What happened to the good old days, Gideon wondered, when they would have just been handed a sack of flour? At least then Gideon would have had the satisfaction of ruining Harrow’s sweater when the two of them inevitably ripped the thing in half. 

Unfortunately, this revelation gave Harrow _ ideas. _When the bell rang, setting off a harmony of shuffling backpacks, Gideon turned toward her unfortunate partner and extended a hand. Harrow ignored her, hooking the baby under her elbow, and marched out into the hallway. 

Gideon trailed after her, cursing those tiny, swift legs of Harrow’s the entire time. 

“Hand her over.”

“No.” 

“Nonagesimus, seriously—”

“Why?” asked Harrow, stopping in her tracks so suddenly that Gideone nearly plowed straight into her. She whirled to face Gideon. It didn’t matter that Gideon had nearly a foot on her, Harrow still managed to glare at her in such a way that Gideon felt she was being looked down on. “So you can shove it in your disgusting gym bag again?”

“Better than you conducting sadistic experiments on her,” Gideon said. The two of them were impeding the flow of traffic through the hallway, but Harrow, whose only concern was for herself, clearly did not give a shit. “Or using her bones for creepy bone rituals. Or—”

“It is a plastic. Doll. Griddle.”

“And you are the mistress of all evil,” Gideon said, “and have clearly never been taught how to hold a baby.” 

Both of their gazes darted down to where the doll was being smothered in the crook of Harrow’s elbow. Gideon had no idea what kind of data was being relayed back to their teacher, but the thing wasn’t crying, which meant maybe Harrow had suffocated it. There were worse fates in life. Like having Harrowhark Nonagesimus for a mother. 

Admittedly, having Gideon Nav for a mother wasn’t much better. Gideon didn’t have a single maternal instinct in her body, but she was willing to make an attempt if it meant that no creature — living, dead, or inanimate — would be subject to Harrow. Besides, Gideon had started to grow attached to the doll, during those odd moments when it was neither screaming nor jammed into the furthest recesses of her closet.

If anything, Harrow held the baby tighter in her arm. “I am not giving her back. I refuse to allow _you _to fail this class for me, Nav. Perhaps your pea-sized brain can’t comprehend anything beyond chasing a ball around like an untrained dog, but I have worked too hard for the past three years to have you — why are you looking at me like that?”

Through the self satisfied, shit eating grin that had worked its way onto her face, Gideon said, “You said _ her_.”

Harrow blinked. Her gaze darted down to the doll smothered in the crook of her arm, eyebrows raised in bewilderment as if she had forgotten it was there. A scowl broke over her face like a thunderous tidal wave, destroying everything in its wake. 

To that, all Harrow could say was, “Go to Hell.” 

And then she stormed off, wearing the kind of expression that had freshmen nearly throwing themselves at lockers to clear out of her path of destruction. Gideon cackled herself all the way to her biology class, where her satisfaction was only slightly dimmed by the write-up she got for being tardy. 


	2. didn’t know you had a thing for goth girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ”Hey, work yourself into an early grave,” said Gideon, shrugging her shoulders. Harrow’s gaze followed the motion, twitching from Gideon’s face to her shoulders, and then, rather pointedly, back up again. “I’ll throw a party. But are you going to be able to take care of her?”
> 
> “All of this… contact sport,” said Harrow, in much the same tones one would use when describing fecal matter, “has ruined your brain after all. It’s a doll.” 
> 
> “She,” Gideon repeated, “Is a robot. You have to do things with her.”   
___________________________________________
> 
> Or: A series of unfortunate text messages, child custody disputes, and a dark and stormy night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m so happy that many of you enjoyed the first chapter! Without further ado, and because I am impatient — on to the next! Thanks again to The Locked Tomb discord server for being super sweet and supportive as always. This one is quite a bit longer than the first — have fun!

Gideon’s first text message to Harrow read: _ hello, my malevolent baby mama _

Harrow, predictably, left her on read. 

Gideon had bummed the phone number from Palamedes after an increasingly elaborate, multifaceted plan of extortion. His and Dulcinea’s robo-baby had been strapped to his chest with one of thosef baby carriers when he came to pick his cousin up from practice. As he plugged Harrow’s number into Gideon’s phone, politely refraining from commenting about the horrendously cracked screen, he said, “It’s nice to see that she's making friends.”

Had it not been for the gallons of water Gideon had lost in sweat over the course of practice, she might have pissed herself laughing. Wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, Gideon said, “Harrowhark Nonagesimus doesn’t know how to _ have _friends.”

Palamedes had frowned at that. Despite an academic rivalry that would probably trigger a world war eventually, Gideon supposed he could be considered Harrow’s closest friend. He was probably the only person on campus who even had her phone number. Unfortunately for Palamedes, he had yet to realize that the only reason Harrow had _ any _ friends was so that she could keep them close enough to sink her blade into their backs once the time was right. 

“She’s not all that bad,” Palamedes had said, “once you’ve warmed up to her.”

Gideon had warmed up to her. Hell, Gideon had spent nearly two years warmed up to her, only to be iced out without a reason, then tormented for years. 

Despite already being a dead man walking, Palamedes had also said, “Don’t tell her I gave you that.”

* * *

Gideon’s second text message to Harrow read: _ how is princess monstertruck doing? _

Harrow’s first text message to Gideon read: _ Absolutely not. _

* * *

After her first night with the doll, Harrow looked just as much like shit as Gideon had. 

Scowling at Gideon once again for daring to take the seat next to hers, Harrow cradled the baby doll to her chest. Her straight shoulders and knit brows screamed stubborn pride, even as the bluish bags pooled under her eyes screamed for the sweet relief of sleep. Gideon leaned back in her chair, offering her trademark shit eating grin and asked, “How was your night with Princess Monstertruck?”

“That is _ not _ her name,” Harrow said acidly. 

“You walked out on us,” Gideon said, balancing on the back legs of the chair. “You don’t get a say in the name.”

From across the room, Corona caught her eye. Her blonde hair puffed out from her head in glossy curls, a golden halo of hair product. She was completely ignoring her baby in favor of anyone and anything else; one day, Corona would make a fabulous MILF and a horrible mother. She winked, and Gideon lost any semblance of balance, nearly braining herself on the back of the desk behind her.

When she managed to right herself, she turned her attention back to Harrow — Harrow, who was staring across the room, gazing at Corona with the kind of expression that she normally saved for Gideon and other things she wanted to pick apart with her bare hands. And maybe a scalpel.

Gideon felt, inexplicably, the urge to explain herself. Since the only excuse she had was something along the lines of, _ I would literally pay Coronabeth Tridentarius cash money to step on me, and then thank her for it, _and therefore not something Harrow wanted nor needed to know, she instead blurted the first thing that came to her mind. 

“What would you have named her?”

Harrow dragged her violent gaze from Corona, instead pinning it on Gideon, and the world reverted back to its natural order. 

“Pelleamena,” she said. “After my mother.”

Gideon scoffed. “Your mother? Your mother’s a grade A—”

In an occasion rarer than a falling star, Gideon bit her tongue. She had long since learned that insulting someone’s mother was a one way ticket to a black eye, no matter how tiny their hands or well-mannered they pretended to be. Gideon must have been missing out on something great — her own mother had died well before Gideon could remember, leaving her well and truly impervious to _ Yo mama _jokes and aching with a hurt like a phantom limb that she had never had. 

Harrow knew all of this. 

Harrow knew all of this, and that was probably why she said nothing. She stared at Gideon, her expression a sheet of indifference that seemed to cut like a blade, offering neither words of anger nor encouragement. That was the other reason Gideon had cut herself off; to mention the severe woman who had occasionally whisked her sickly daughter from class, her own black eyes burning with disdain upon each interaction with Gideon, would be to dredge up that fragile sliver of their lives in which they hand been friends. And not just friends — best friends, first friends.

Gideon’s neck grew hot, unfortunately due to reasons other than Corona flirting from across the room. 

“Take her,” Harrow said, reaching across the chasm of the walkway that stretched out between the two of them. “I didn’t get any sleep last night. 

Gideon took Princess Monstertruck, and the doll sat on her lap throughout the rest of the class. 

* * *

“You have an audience.”

Camilla had chosen just the right time to share this with Gideon, who had just upended an entire water bottle over her head. She blinked the water out of her eyes, the world around her disappearing into a blur of green grass and blue sky. 

“Huh?”

Camilla nodded toward the bleachers. 

That Gideon had an audience was only a surprise to Gideon who, for all her posturing, could not bring herself to accept that the occasional gaggle of girls that materialized, giggling, on the bleachers were there for her. The rest of the team was painfully aware of their number nine’s reputation, and nearly all of them had chased a spectator or two away from the practice field. Gideon herself was simply happy that others were excited about their team, and didn’t see the reason in chasing supporters away — especially when getting butts in seats for a game was like pulling teeth. 

Still, none of that enthusiasm for the game prepared her for the near heart attack she got when she followed Camilla’s line of sight, expecting to see… literally anyone except Harrowhark Nonagesimus. 

Even seated on the aluminum bleacher, the single greatest pain in the ass known to humankind, Harrow sat ramrod straight. Her scrawny legs were propped up on the bleacher in front of her, and the hood of her black sweatshirt was pulled up over her short hair. Gideon could not see her face, but she would bet money that Harrow was scowling, simply because Gideon didn’t think she knew _ how _to do anything else with her face. 

Clad head to toe in black, sleeves longer than any sleeves had business being this time of year, Harrow looked like a hole of darkness cut into the shining silver bleachers. The only burst of color was the doll in her lap, clad in faded pink pajamas: Princess Monstertruck, facing the field with the same dead-eyed stare as her mother. 

“Shit,” muttered Gideon.

“Who’s that?” Asked one of Gideon’s teammates, a pleasant blonde girl with a pretty face and a body built, in the best of ways, like a brick shithouse. 

“The devil himself,” Gideon said conversationally. And then, shoving her water bottle into Camilla’s unwilling hands, “Hold this.”

Once she hit eighteen, Gideon would have to start buying lottery tickets. Harrow was indeed scowling when Gideon made it to the the short fence that separated the field from the bleachers. Gideon propped her arms up on the bar of the fence, trying to look cool and failing miserably. 

“Have you come to cast a plague upon my house?”

Harrow’s glare swept from Gideon to the field, and then back to Gideon. “Don’t tempt me,” she said, voice dry. 

“You do destroy everything you lay your eyes on.”

Harrow sized Gideon up, the silence spanning long enough that Gideon had to grip the bar under her hands to keep from squirming. For once in her life, Harrow was taller than someone; even seated, the bleachers gave her a height advantage, and she stared despotically down at Gideon like a lord looming over his subjects. Her eyes contemptuously followed a drop of — water, sweat, Gideon wasn’t sure, but a drop of _ something _— as it slid down Gideon’s neck, dipping past her collarbone to slip beneath the mesh of her practice jersey. Quite suddenly, Gideon felt aware of her disheveled hair, her grass-stained practice clothing, and the fact that Harrow had undoubtedly just seen her dump half a liter of water on her head like some kind of hopped up football player in a Gatorade commercial. 

“How I wish that were true,” Harrow said at length. She lifted the baby doll in her lap. Had it been anyone else, the contrast between the doll, with its rosy pink cheeks and even pinker pajamas, and its holder, dressed like a mortician gone rogue, would have been comical. Since it was Harrow, it was simply disturbing. “I am taking — her.”

Gideon raised an eyebrow. She meant to ask what kind of witchcraft Harrow wanted it for, but instead blurted, “I thought you couldn’t sleep last night?”

Harrow looked out at Gideon with an expression still as marble, and just as cold. “And neither will I be able to sleep tonight, knowing that my GPA is in your incapable hands.”

“Hey, work yourself into an early grave,” said Gideon, shrugging her shoulders. Harrow’s gaze followed the motion, twitching from Gideon’s face to her shoulders, and then, rather pointedly, back up again. “I’ll throw a party. But are you going to be able to take care of her?”

“All of this… _ contact sport _,” said Harrow, in much the same tones one would use when describing fecal matter, “has ruined your brain after all. It’s a doll.” 

“_She _,” Gideon repeated, “Is a robot. You have to do things with her.” 

If anyone had asked Gideon her opinion, she still would have said to go with the sack of flour. Cost effective _ and _easy; if the bag breaks it’s an F, if it doesn’t it’s an A. Easy. Instead, the school had flushed as much money as it possibly could down the drain, for no reason that Gideon could possibly comprehend other than psychological torture. The result? Some bona-fide robot babies that would be glitching out hardcore in five classes, max. 

It wasn’t just about shaking the thing until it shut up, or leaving it in a closet so you could get some peace and quiet. Instead, you had to actually _ do _things with the doll, like simulate feeding and changing it. All of this Dulcinea had explained to Gideon during lunch, when Gideon had found her relaxing under a blossoming tree, cooing at her and Palamedes’ baby doll in much the same way that Gideon would have liked Dulcinea to coo at her. 

That stolen half hour had been torture, yet still not nearly as painful as the sound of the bell signaling that lunch had come to a close. Gideon had nearly died when Dulcinea batted her eyelashes and extended a hand for Gideon to help her up. It had been a glimpse of the life that Gideon should have had, lunches on the back lawn with sweet Dulcinea at her side and _ their _baby doll bouncing on her lap. 

Instead, she had been landed with a mall goth gremlin that was staring at Gideon like she had grown a second head, and one that Harrow deemed unbelievably uglier than the first. 

Careful to exclude both the source and domestic fantasies surrounding said source from her spiel, Gideon relayed her new information to Harrow, whose face contorted into increasingly comical shapes. 

"Hey—”

"So I'm just saying, if you're just gonna jam her in the back of your closet like a dirty magazine —”

"Griddle—”

"I know, disgusting, whatever, I'm just saying— "

Whatever Gideon was saying was cut off by a ball to the back of her head. It bounced off her head and hit the ground with a sad thump. It was only slightly less painful than the instructions that followed it, a hollered, "Nine, stop flirting and get your ass back over here!"

Gideon didn't know if it was the threat of concussion or the insinuation that she would, in any universe, flirt with _ Harrowhark Nonagesimus _that was making her nauseous. As she rubbed at the tender spot at the back of her head, she noted that Harrow must have felt the same. Her partner's dark gaze had moved beyond Gideon, fixing acrimoniously on one of Gideon's teammates. Harrow stared so long and hard that Gideon wondered if she really was casting a curse on the poor girl. 

"Ow," was the most eloquent thing Gideon could say, probably because her only other option was to keel over and vomit. Harrow dragged her sanguine gaze back to the conversation at hand. She blinked first down at the ball, which had been halted in its path by the chain link fence, then back up to Gideon. Her pointed jaw was set in aggravation. 

Harrow rose to her feet, gathering herself together impetuously. Princess Monstertruck was clutched loosely to her chest. "I will take her," she said sanctimoniously, and then swept out of the bleachers like a bat out of hell. 

When Gideon made her way back to the small cluster of her teammates pretending to mask gossip with stretches, one of them said to her, "I didn't know you had a thing for goth girls." 

Gideon good naturedly tackled her to the ground. 

* * *

Harrow's second text message to Gideon read: _ How do you make it stop. _

It came in a little after ten PM, when Gideon had transitioned from neglecting her biology homework to neglecting her English homework instead. She had a bowl of cereal balanced on her lap, a video game controller in her hand, and was having the vague beginnings of an idea regarding the skin mag stashed under her bed when Harrow, boner killer extraordinaire, sent her a text regarding childcare. 

Gideon rolled her eyes. The only thing that kept her from chucking her phone across the room and rolling to the other side was the fact that she didn’t want to get bumped down a string for her senior year due to a shitty GPA. 

And the fact that, before she could quite raise her hand to toss her phone across the bed, it vibrated again. The screen lit up with a simple, _ Please. _

Contrary to popular belief, Gideon was a good person at heart. 

So she huffed a sigh and tapped out a message to Harrow, spoon still dangling from her mouth. 

_ arcane witchcraft, _ Gideon sent. And then, a moment later, _ did you try swaddling her? _

The next thing she got was a picture of the doll lying on a black duvet (because this was Harrow), swaddled rather crudely. Thankfully, Harrow had not been sadistic enough to send a video; without the ear splitting screams echoing from its grainy voice box, Princess Monstertruck looked dead eyed and peaceful. 

_ I think it’s broken. _

Wonderful. At least one of them had been put out of their misery. 

_ It’s been crying for over an hour. _

Gideon gulped the milk from her cereal down. With a sigh, she set it heavily on her nightstand, then pushed herself out of bed to fumble around for a pair of sweatpants. 

Because Gideon had probably been possessed sometime in the past few days, or maybe because she was a masochist, or maybe because she couldn’t stand to see the doll suffer at Harrow’s hands, she typed out, _ do you want me to come over? _

The response was almost instantaneous. No capitals, no periods, just a simple: _ no _

Gideon peeled her newly donned sweatpants off and collapsed back into bed. 

Five minutes later, her phone went off again. 

_ Unless you want to. _

On the sweatpants went. Gideon shook her head with a sigh, and went off in search of a sweater, eventually surfacing from her closet with her team hoodie in one hand. She shrugged it on, then thought the better of it; having her name and number emblazoned in bright white text on the back _ probably _wasn’t the best way to sneak out of the house. 

She traded it out for a plain black hoodie, and then stood in the room, hands on her hips, and thought.

_ give me fifteen. _

Despite being seventeen years old — practically an adult, really — Gideon knew she would be flayed alive if she tried to waltz out Aiglamene’s front door at nearly eleven on a school night, especially while dressed in the pajamas of a homeless frat boy. She picked her house key from her team lanyard, knowing that the car key would be useless in this situation, and commenced with a plan of action that she had only taken once before, when the promise of a Tridentarius party had outweighed the threat of dying young. 

Gideon had been caught and slapped into a period of house arrest that practically violated the Geneva conventions in its scope, but she had also had her first kiss at that party, so. Worth it. 

She could only pray that neither of those things happened this time around. Or, maybe it would be better if she got caught. “Sorry, can’t make it, will be in solitary confinement until graduation,” seemed a pretty decent excuse for standing her partner up. 

Gideon had gotten smarter since the last time; instead of sneaking out from her own bedroom window and nearly impaling herself on the branches of the tree outside, leaving one of them dragging against the living room window, Gideon quietly made her way down the stairs and into the one room in the house that she would only enter under severe duress: the laundry room. Knowing that Aiglamene would never look for evidence there, she slipped out the window and into the night, stopping only to grab her rickety bike from the garage before she left. 

* * *

The Nonagesimus family lived just on the edge of town, in a sprawling house of dark stone. Gideon had been here only once in her early childhood years, just long enough to know that she never wanted to come back. At night, it looked like a mausoleum. It even had a wrought iron gate. It would be the greatest disappointment of Gideon’s life if it _ wasn’t _haunted. 

The gate swung open on Gideon’s arrival, something she would have delightedly chalked up to ghosts had she not first had to stop and punch in the key code that Harrow had texted her. As she made her way up the long driveway to Harrow’s funeral home of a house, she felt decidedly out of place in her Nike slides and sweatpants. 

She spent a significant amount of time in the driveway, languishing over her phone and wondering what would be the best way to get into the house. Should she try climbing up to Harrow’s window? Too 80s teen romcom. Should she try breaking in through the back door? Too 80s teen slasher.

While she was standing there pondering her choices and tapping out a message to Harrow with cold fingers, the front door swung open. Gideon was rather disappointed to see Harrow standing there, rather than the kind of tall, ominous butlers that populated creepy houses in old horror movies. To be fair, though, Gideon was typically rather disappointed to see Harrow. 

Imposing butler or not, Harrow still had a monopoly on creepy. She stood in the shadowed foyer of the house, clad in the kind of dark nightgown that a Victorian ghost might have been drowned in. Her face looked weird — tired, maybe. 

“Jesus, you creep, how long have you been waiting there?”

Harrow rolled her eyes and pushed the door open wider.

“Where should I—” Gideon motioned toward her bike, suddenly very aware that it was essentially a set of wheels clipped together with scrap metal. 

“Just leave it there,” Harrow said, and then disappeared into the shadowy depths of her house. 

With the foreboding sense that she was walking into her own grave, Gideon followed Harrow into the crypt she called a house. 

Inside, Gideon was surprised to notice, it was actually rather nice. It was neat, tidy in the kind of way that only really occurred in the pages of magazines. _ Mausoleum Monthly. _The architecture was old, staircases spiralling up into high ceilings, but the decor was modern, sterile and crisp as an operating room. In the day, it might have been bright, flooded by natural light from the long windows. This late at night, darkness seemed to collect in the space under the stairs, in the empty void of long hallways.

Gideon nearly put her foot through a stair at the second landing. It creaked loudly, cracking through the empty house like a whip, and Gideon froze in terror. 

“What are you standing there for?” 

Harrow stood at the top of the landing, staring down at Gideon with her hateful little eyes, either unaware or uncaring of the danger they were in. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she had never been on the receiving end of her own mother’s glare. The handful of times that Gideon had met Pelleamena, she had regarded Gideon exactly as if she, personally, had pissed on the carpet. That hateful expression was probably the one thing she had passed down to her equally terrible daughter. 

“Your parents,” hissed Gideon, creeping up the stairs behind Harrow as quietly as she could. 

A small smile flickered across Harrow’s face. It was not a pleasant one, and it was gone as quickly as it had arrived. “You can be as loud as you want,” Harrow said disinterestedly, turning her back on Gideon and veering down a hall. “No one else is here.”

Painful as it was, Gideon bit back a _ That’s what she said _joke. Instead, she followed Harrow through the labyrinthine house. The further into the house they delved, the louder the sound of canned crying grew. By the time they reached the door to Harrow’s room, it was fucking deafening. Harrow hesitated, just a beat, before pushing the door open. She motioned Gideon inside with a curt jerk of her head. 

If being in Harrow’s house was surreal, then being in her room was a fucked up, NyQuil-induced fever dream. It was more mundane than Gideon had expected. Gideon had expected blood pentagrams on the floors, and piles of animal bones, and, like, the weird stick figures from the Blair Witch Project. Instead, she was met with a somewhat plain and surprisingly messy room, dominated mostly by a four-poster bed that could probably swallow Harrow’s spindly form whole, which was currently being used as a repository for laundry. The walls — or, rather, the patches of wall thrown in here and there between bookshelves — were neither black nor blood splattered, just a pleasant shade of dove gray. A black cardigan was thrown haphazardly over the back of the desk chair, bearing witness to the loose cosmetics scattered across the surface of the desk. 

Gideon looked at Harrow. _ That _ was why she looked so weird; her face had been scrubbed of the dark eyeliner she wore at school, and she looked… young. Unguarded. Tired. Her bony face looked something like that chubby-faced child Gideon had met years ago, a friend forged through nothing more significant than a letter of the alphabet. 

This Harrow, however, was not a friend. And she did not take kindly to being stared at. She snapped her fingers in impatience, and the spell was broken. Instead of seeing Harrow for what she had been, Gideon saw Harrow for what she was now: a heinous tyrant. 

A heinous tyrant that was going to decapitate a baby doll with her bare hands if Gideon didn’t intervene soon. 

Princess Monstertruck lay on the bed, absolutely fucking _ wailing. _

“God, what did you do? Break her?”

Harrow crossed her arms over her chest defensively and muttered, “I’ll break _ you. _”

Another fabulous opportunity for a _ That’s what she said, _ destroyed entirely by the fact that Harrow was the other party, and Gideon could still feel the spot in the back of her head where a teammate had embedded both a rugby ball and an accusation of flirting. _ Flirting. _As if anyone in their right mind would flirt with Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and then live to tell the tale. The thought was enough to turn Gideon’s stomach. Harrow was like one of those stick bugs that devoured their mates after reproduction. 

It took Gideon an embarrassing amount of time to get the baby to shut up, but the sweet relief that came from the silence was priceless. She lowered Princess Monstertruck gingerly to the cushion of the desk chair, and then slung the cardigan draped over the back onto the baby like a blanket for an additional flourish. She and Harrow stood watching the doll like a ticking time bomb, breath held until they were nearly blue in the face. 

When it was evident that the baby wasn’t going to erupt into screams so long as no one so much as breathed its way, Harrow lowered herself down onto the edge of the bed. Gideon, in contrast, stood directly in the middle of the room, trying her hardest not to touch a single surface. She tried not to look at things either, but that soon proved impossible; her gaze drifted curiously through the room, taking in all the little details that made this room Harrow’s. A line of nail polish bottles, organized in a gradient from pale grey to the blackest black Gideon had ever seen. Books crammed into shelves — not neat and precise, as Gideon had expected, but stacked one on top of each other, crammed catercorner into every available space. A single discarded shoe, laying forlornly to the side of the bed. 

At one point in time, Gideon might have killed to be in here, to get the chance to sit with Harrow in her own little world and just shoot the shit. Now, she just wanted to get out of there via the fastest route possible, even if that happened to be the window. 

“How’s your head?”

“Huh?”

“How’s your head,” repeated Harrow exactingly, more of a statement than a question. 

Clearly worse off than Gideon had thought, if she was meant to believe that _ Harrowhark Nonagesimus, _ orchestrator of her childhood torment, Mistress of the Night, mythic bitch of unparalleled proportion, was asking after her well being. Gideon surreptitiously pinched herself; the bloom of pain between her ragged fingernails confirmed that, yes, she _ had _somehow crossed into an alternate dimension. Maybe she had been hit by a bus on the way here, and was drifting somewhere in sick limbo. 

Desperate to mask her shock, and because Gideon was Gideon, what came out of her mouth was, “Haven’t had any complaints.”

That landed just as well as Gideon thought it would. Harrow’s face screwed up in revulsion. The scrap of skin visible over the high neck of her puritanical nightgown flushed with color. “You are _ foul _ ,” Harrow declared. “You are _ childish. _You are—”

“Hey, where are your parents?” 

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Harrow said acidly, automatically. Her gaze darted from Gideon, standing in the middle of the room, avoiding contact with anything as if it might poison her, and then to the desk chair, where Princess Monstertruck dreamt of electric sheep. Her ungrateful little ass must have had a change of heart, because she finally grit out, “China,” with the tone of voice that implied Gideon had taken a set of pliers to her front teeth. 

And then, a minute later, she cocked her head. “No. Germany?” 

Gideon stared at her. “Wait, are you telling me or asking me?”

Harrow plucked at the fabric of her nightgown. Were it anyone else, the gesture might have appeared… nervous? But this was Harrow, so Gideon assumed she was simply assessing which errant thread would be the best to strangle Gideon with. 

“It is irrelevant,” said Harrow. “They are off on business.” 

Harrow’s parents could have been anything from taxidermists to covert assassins to traveling sex toy salespeople, for all Gideon knew. She drifted toward the bookshelves, idly scraping her gaze over some of the titles. Classic literature — yuck. Medical textbooks — interesting, if also yuck. Smut? Not unless Harrow was doing a very good at hiding it, unfortunately.

“For a while?”

“Yes.” 

Gideon hummed. “That must be nice. Big place all to yourself. Throw a party or two.” 

“It’s not.” 

Step one: take foot. Step two: insert it directly into mouth. Step three: Chew vigorously. 

Something in Harrow’s tone caught Gideon’s attention. When Gideon turned back to look at her, Harrow was staring out the window, where an unexpected shower of spring rain battered the pane. From this angle, Gideon could just catch the watery strokes of Harrow’s reflection in the glass, her face unguarded. Forlorn. She could have been in an emo music video. 

When she looked up at Gideon that expression was gone, her face closing off again into an unmovable sheet of stone. She opened her mouth to say something, but Gideon beat her to it. 

“I should go,” Gideon said. As if in mocking response, the rain torpedoed the window even harder. Gideon didn’t care — she loved a challenge, and she hated _ feelings _ . Ten minutes ago, she hadn’t even thought Harrow _ had _feelings. She still wouldn’t have, if not for that quiet little voice and sad little face. Gideon was only good for comfort as far as a “That’s rough, man,” and a hug, and while the former might be acceptable, the latter would probably end in spontaneous combustion. 

Harrow frowned at the window again. “In this? You’ll be soaked to the bone.”

Okay, yeah, so maybe Gideon did have a concussion. 

Maybe that would get her out of her upcoming Spanish test. She could barely conjugate as it was, how was she supposed to do anything while having auditory hallucinations? Because either Gideon was losing her mind, or Harrow had a rather funny way of saying, _ Go drown yourself in it, for all that I care. _

“Yup,” said Gideon, inching back toward her slides, which she had kicked off by the door. 

“Have you gone mad?”

_ I think so, _thought Gideon hysterically, because that was the easiest way to cope with Harrow’s newfound… concern? She flipped up the hood of her sweater, more to have something to do with her hands than anything. “If Aiglamene wakes up and I’m not home, I’ll be a dead girl walking,” Gideon said. “She’ll tear me limb from limb. She’ll flay my lifeless corpse and display it in the window next Halloween. She’ll make me quit the team.” 

“You are _ ridiculously _dramatic,” said Harrow. And then, “I’ll show you out.” 

The house was less glamorous on the way out. The high ceilings weren’t beautiful to Gideon anymore, simply the trappings of a cave instead of soaring testaments to luxury. As she stared at the tight, narrow line of Harrow’s shoulders just ahead, Gideon couldn’t help but realize how tiny Harrow looked in this big house. 

Big, and also _ empty. _There were at least a zillion rooms in this place, and only one Harrow. 

Gideon lingered at the front door, fully basking in a quick pity party as she stared at the downpour outside. Could Aiglamene _ really _ blame her for staying the night? Would she rather that Gideon die a watery death, drowned in the murky depths of an overflowing pothole? Was it _ really _worth a fifteen minute ride in soggy socks?

Then again, the alternative was _ staying the night at Harrow’s house. _The thought had Gideon nearly racing to her bike, socks and slides be damned. She knew for a fact that if she stayed in that house, something — most likely Harrow — would eat her soul in the night. 

“I hope you can swim,” said Harrow in the leaden tone of one who wouldn’t bother to throw Gideon a life preserver even if both of their lives depended on it.

Gideon tightened the strings of her hood and stepped down to retrieve her sorry, waterlogged excuse of a bicycle. “Unfortunately for you, I _ can. _I refuse to leave behind an orphan.” 

For anyone who _ hadn’t _been raised in the woods by wolves, that kind of joke normally resulted in about three seconds of entertainment for Gideon, followed by an excruciating period of awkward, squirming platitudes from the other party. Thankfully, Harrow had the empathetic touch of a sledgehammer. She sized Gideon up for a moment, mouth screwed together as if she couldn’t quite spit out the right words, and then settled for an exaggerated roll of her beady eyes. 

Gideon expected some kind of snarky response about how Princess Monstertuck would be better off without her, which is why she tripped and nearly impaled herself on a handlebar when Harrow said instead, "Thank you." 

Gideon looked at Harrow, hoping that her upturned hood would prevent Harrow from noticing that her eyebrows had crawled up to her Hairline. Harrow skulked in the open doorway like a ghost, chin imperiously upturned and eyes fixated on Gideon like she was a tall, sexy Rubix cube she couldn't quite jam into place.

"I didn't think you would come," said Harrow, voice quieter this time.

_ Neither the fuck did I, _thought Gideon. She slung a leg over the bike and sank down onto the soggy seat, immediately soaking her ass to the bone. "Yeah, well," she said, leaning forward on the handlebars, "All you had to do was ask." 

Harrow stared at her. For a moment, the only sound was the susurrus of the rain crashing down around Gideon. 

Bare of cosmetics, Harrow’s face was surprisingly expressive. Not that they were any expressions Gideon could decode. Her narrow eyes widened, her jaw working together. “All I had to do,” she repeated, “was _ ask _ ?” She looked — she looked _ angry _. That final, chilly word crept out of her mouth like a swear word. 

“Uh, yeah,” said Gideon. And then followed it up with, “Asswipe.” 

Harrow’s lips pressed together tightly, the delicate bow of her lips flattening into an angry, colorless gash across her face. 

“Try not to drown,” she said, and then she closed the door.

* * *

In second period the next day, both Gideon and Harrow looked like absolute shit — but Princess Monstertruck was blissfully quiet the whole morning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all enjoyed it! Comments and kind words are, of course, very appreciated. Feel free to hit me up on tumblr at [strangehunger](%E2%80%9Cstrangehunger%E2%80%9D) or message me on here.


	3. the hands of fate deal cruel blows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even beneath layers of her gothy makeup, Gideon could see that Harrow’s face was doing that strange thing again: A flush ran from the visible slip of her collarbone to her neck, culminating in a dusting of color across the tops of her cheekbones. Gideon decided that it was prudent to look literally anywhere else, and instead focused on the plumes of grey smoke rolling out the front door. From deep within the house, a fire alarm was sounding. 
> 
> “You do know that murder-suicide is, like a one way ticket to F-town, right?” Asked Gideon. “Like, I totally get it, but then Palamedes would be valedictorian, and can you really allow that to happen?”
> 
> “I can feel my brain cells deteriorating just listening to you.”
> 
> “I have that effect on people. It’s called a high. Dopamine.” 
> 
> “A big word for a small brain,” said Harrow, turning to go into the house without further comment. When Gideon didn’t immediately follow, she stuck her sharp little face around the door and said, “Well?”
> 
> Well, indeed. 
> 
> __________
> 
> In which Gideon finds herself in Hell’s kitchen.
> 
> tw: references to parental death + car crashes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The feedback for this has been so sweet! I always appreciate hearing from all of you, this is such a wonderful fandom. Have fun! Again, specific shoutouts for Cheyanne, Lindsay, and the entire Gideon the Ninth discord!

Hell thawed. Harrow defrosted. Gideon didn’t know what to do with this. 

When she arrived in bleak corner of the library that Harrow and Palamedes Sextus had secluded themselves in over the lunch period, Harrow waved. _ Waved. _She barely lifted her eyes from the ridiculous book laid out in front of her, a tome of dark, unknowable lore. Well, an organic chemistry textbook, but, like, same thing. Harrow flicked her gaze up to Gideon, gave a short jerk of her fingers that in Harrow-speak translated to a Disney Princess wave, and then nodded toward where Princess Monstertruck lay on the table. 

Gideon had a deathwish apparently, because she flopped down into the chair opposite Harrow, studied the two resident nerds, and said, “Dude. You two have _ got _ to go outside sometime.” 

Illuminated by the bluish light of his laptop, Palamedes looked like an anime character. His glasses glinted ominously when he tilted his head up to look at Gideon, one eyebrow quirked higher than the other. He looked awfully calm, seated side by side with someone who would rather hunt him for sport than settle for the title of salutatorian. 

“Gideon,” he greeted, with just the vaguest hints of the long-suffering tone often employed when anyone said her name, “when _ was _the last time you read a book?”

Gideon leaned forward, cupping her hands around the plastic impression of ears on Princess Monstertruck’s hollow head. “Skin mags count?”

Two sets of eyes stared back at her, one more murderous than the other. Harrow’s pencil appeared ready to snap within her tight grip. 

“I read them for the articles?”

“Disgusting as ever,” said Harrow, voice dripping with scorn. 

Deathwish confirmed. Before Gideon could stop herself, she had signed her own death decree with a blurted, “Says the one who called me over in the middle of the night last night.” 

_ That _got Palamedes’ attention. He paused, tilting his laptop screen down ever so slightly, because this was apparently more important than decoding the Voynich Manuscript or sequencing the human genome or whatever it was he was plugging away at. He turned to look at Harrow with the most minute of eyebrow lifts.

Harrow, on the other hand, was doing something interesting with her face. Had she been looking at an actual human being and not a goddamn harpy, Gideon might have thought that Harrow was _ blushing. _ The high bones of her cheeks were painted a faint, splotchy red. The effect was rather disturbing, if only because it made Harrow, nauseating queen of the night, orchestrator of all of Gideon’s misfortunes, ultra-bitch extraordinaire, look almost _ cute, _a word that had probably only ever been used to describe Harrow by one of her creepy blind aunts on a morphine bender. 

Gideon wasn’t gonna touch that. She shoved that thought deep down, cramming it into the inner recesses of her psyche where the rest of the trauma went, and focused instead on Harrow’s dark, hateful eyes. She looked like she was trying to determine which artery of Gideon’s she wanted to slam her pencil into. 

Palamedes opened his mouth. 

“Enough_,” _hissed Harrow preemptively. To Gideon, she said, “Will you be able to handle her this weekend?” As if she hadn’t been the one to come crying to Gideon just yesterday, interrupting a nice, quiet evening of video games and dirty magazines in the process. 

Gideon popped the doll onto her lap. “Sure. Worse case scenario, I pop the voice box out.”

“This is serious, Nav,” said Harrow, voice thin and sharp as a blade. “If you aren’t going to put any effort into this, I—”

“You’ll what? Take the kids in the divorce?”

“You know it’s a partner project, right?” Came Palamedes’ level voice. His gaze flicked between the he two of them, then down at the doll. His own was noticeably absent from the conversation, but the baby sling he had taken to wearing (because Palamedes Sextus didn’t do things by halves) had been slung over one edge of the table. “You aren’t doing it together?”

Gideon leaned away from the table, balancing on the back legs of the library chair. “Yeah, well, not all of us get to play house with Dulcinea Septimus.”

In a fair world, Palamedes _ would _have been partnered with Dulcinea, but even so Gideon would have happily taken out Palamedes at the kneecaps for a chance to spend two glorious weeks in la-la-land with Dulcinea. Palamedes was far too good to do the same, despite the fact that he had been carrying a torch for Dulcinea since junior high. He was unfailingly a gentleman, even when Dulcinea turned her cobalt eyes on Gideon at the end of Home Ec and batted her feathery lashes, landing Gideon halfway across campus with a seafoam blue backpack in one hand, Dulcinea’s translucent hand in the crook of her other elbow, and Palamedes back in the cold, harsh hallway. 

To be fair, Gideon _ did _feel like a tool for it. But, hey, she was only human. And despite how good the two of them may look together, Palamedes did not have a monopoly on having a hopeless crush on Dulcinea Septimus. 

Across the table, Harrow muttered acrimoniously, “Of course not. You need at least one brain in each group.” 

Predictably, Harrow hated Dulcinea with the same fervor that she hated anything that brought Gideon even a shred of joy. She didn’t try to hide it, not even around Palamedes, who worshipped the ground Dulcinea walked on only slightly less than he did his TI-84. Gideon expected him to rise to the occasion, a white knight with a passionate, verbose defense of Dulcinea’s virtue fueled by whatever dictionary he had absorbed at the age of ten. She herself could feel a swell of agitation rising within her, an omnipresent sensation when faced with Harrow. 

Palamedes must have seen something in her expression, because he caught Gideon’s eyes and, instead of launching into a full Ace Attorney defense of Dulcinea, gave her a minute shake of the head. 

“And yet they paired the two of you together,” said Palamedes levelly, logically, in the tones of someone who could tell you to go fuck yourself six ways to Sunday and still sound reasonable. 

“The hands of fate deal cruel blows,” came Harrow’s surly reply. 

Palamedes, being either blind or insane, replied, “Better than Tridentarius?”

The look Harrow gave him could have pierced Teflon. 

The front legs of Gideon’s chair hit the carpeted floor with a dull _ thud _ — perfect timing; Crux, the decaying librarian who would have gladly flayed Gideon alive and used her skin for bookbinding if given the chance, rounded the corner just in time to catch Gideon with an innocent smile on her face and the legs of her chair firmly on the ground. He shuffled his circulation cart out of the way, muttering what Gideon could only assume were foul curses under his breath. 

Gideon crossed her arms on the table in front of her and slouched forward, nearly embedding Princess Monstertruck into her abdomen. “What’s wrong with Corona?” Gideon asked, knowing full well that the answer to that question was _ absolutely nothing. _Coronabeth Tridentarius was like a gold dipped statue wrapped in a designer coat wrapped in every teenage fantasy Gideon had ever had. With clouds of curly blonde hair, a body that could make Gideon weep, and eyes that shone like gemstones, she was easily the most beautiful girl in the school, possibly even the world. Who cared if she was a little unhinged? That just added to the appeal. 

“Ianthe,” corrected Palamedes helpfully, and then he winced. Gideon, who had been on the receiving end of Harrow’s wrath plenty of times over the last ten years, assumed that Harrow had kicked him under the table. 

Ah, yes. Tridentarius number two, possibly the only person in the entire school who could outdo Harrow in the creep department. Significantly inferior to her sister in babeliness, but Gideon would have paid cash money to copy her homework. Distracted by the more radiant Tridentarius twin, Gideon had completely forgotten that Ianthe shared second period with them. 

What Harrow had against Ianthe Tridentarius was beyond Gideon. If anything the two of them — sickly, twiggy, and viciously mean — would make a good pair. 

“Nonagesimus and Ianthe? Sounds like a one way ticket to childhood trauma.” 

Palamedes’ startlingly grey eyes were carefully devoid of expression when he flicked his gaze to Harrow. The only change in her expression was an almost imperceptible twitch of the eyebrow, and yet that was enough for Gideon to know that an entire conversation was happening over her head. 

“This topic is irrelevant,” said Harrow with finality, “because I was paired with Griddle, whose head is as empty as that doll’s.” 

“Princess Monstertruck,” corrected Gideon helpfully. 

Palamedes let out a rather un-Palamadeslike snort, which he disguised as a cough. Harrow’s eye twitched, but she didn’t refute the name. 

Grinning at Palamedes, Gideon ribbed, “What, do _ you _have anything better?” 

“No,” Palamede said with a shrug, “We named ours after Dulcinea’s mother.” 

* * *

“No girlfriend today?” 

Judith might as well have kicked Gideon in the head. The water bottle in Gideon’s hand was no match for the strength of her clenched fist, fueled by shock, mortification, and disgust. An arc of water shot through the air, effectively dousing their rugby coach, and Gideon spent the rest of practice running laps and angrily cursing Harrow, who could ruin her day without even _ being _there. 

* * *

Aiglamene nearly pissed herself laughing when Gideon walked in through the front door on Friday night, Princess Monstertruck stuffed into a drawstring bag and slung around Gideon’s frontside like a mockery of the baby carrier Palamedes wore with pride. Only the head stuck out, the doll’s vacant eyes bearing down at everything in its path. _Very _effective for trying to avoid conversation with the neighbors, who already thought Gideon was a nut anyway. 

“Maybe this will finally teach you some discipline,” said Aiglamene, who had been trying to whip Gideon into shape since she took custody of her over ten years ago. Gideon resented that; she had certainly been whipped into shape over the years, just a rather abstract one. One that liked to nick dirty magazines from convenience stores during junior high, or take the car for a joyride every now and then, or sneak out in the middle of the night on a school night, leave a sopping mess on the laundry room floor trying to clamber back in through the window, and then blame it on the washing machine. 

The closest thing to _ discipline _this assignment was going to teach Gideon was possibly patience, and even then, who knew? She and Harrow could still strangle one another over the next week and a half, and Gideon said as much. Aiglamene’s response to that was to get on her case about the importance of her grades, and then to slap her with a pile of dishes before she was allowed to sulk off to her room to play video games. 

Gideon did the dishes with Princess Monstertruck propped up on the counter, staring at her with those vacant eyes. 

If they were both being honest, which neither Gideon nor Aiglamene would ever be, Aiglamene had done a pretty good job. Despite all the odds, Gideon had emerged from childhood with all of her limbs, at least some of her wits, and a fairly manageable amount of trauma for a kid who had bopped between foster homes for the first few years of her life. Emotionally stunted as hell, sure, but she wasn’t going to learn any of that from _ Aiglamene, _ of all people. The two of them had a pretty staunch _ Don’t ask, don’t tell _ system when it came to feelings, and Gideon liked it that way. It was hard enough for her to handle the sudden appearance of a _ #9 _ sticker on the back of Aiglamene’s truck after Gideon had made the cut for the rugby team, or the occasional _ “I’ve heard so much about you,” _from one of Aiglamene’s colleagues down at the precinct. If true words of praise ever came from Aiglamene’s mouth, Gideon’s heart couldn’t handle it. 

Gideon lightly flicked her hand at Princess Monstertruck, painting the baby in light spray of soapy water. Aiglamene had never wanted to be a mother, until she had met a red headed mop of a kid with no other place to go. From what she knew about her real mother, she _ had _wanted Gideon — until a reckless driver had drifted over the median, killing the elder Navs in a technicolor inferno that Gideon couldn’t quite remember, but still saw in her dreams sometimes. 

_ Lucky Aiglamene_, Gideon thought. She got to skip the diapers, after all. 

Inexplicably, Gideon thought of Harrow, alone in that big, empty house. 

* * *

_ Have you killed her yet? _

_ aww, you said her :) next time, try her name. _

Gideon kicked her feet up against the wall, back flat against the bed, and reread Harrow’s most recent text. The blue bubble of text, time-stamped to _ early as fuck o’clock, _seemed to drip with venom. Gideon expected to be left on read — Harrow’s modus operandi for years was to forget that Gideon existed just long enough to lure Gideon into a false sense of security before striking. She had taken a similar approach to parenting, it seemed. 

Gideon gnawed on a piece of toast, attempting to do so without showering herself with crumbs at this angle, and failed miserably. She was shaking the crumbs out of her shirt when her phone lit up again. 

_ I would rather die a painful death than ever utter those words together, _ came Harrow’s acrid reply, apparently unaware that she had provided Gideon with the perfect segue into a “ _ Then Perish” _meme. 

For someone who wanted less to do with the doll and even _less_ to do with Gideon unless it involved getting her hands around Gideon’s throat in the un-sexy way (for Harrow, who had the sexual appeal of a possessed craigslist puppet, everything was done in the un-sexy way), Harrow was sure concerned about the well-being of the doll. Throughout the rest of the day, it felt like Gideon couldn’t so much as take a piss without some snarky text from Harrow, insulting both her mental capacity and parenting ability. Warranted, considering Gideon had done yard work with Princess Monstertruck strapped to the front of the lawn mower like some kind of sick Mad Max parody with infants, but Harrow didn’t _ know _that. 

Eventually, Gideon had snapped. _ would you, o mother dearest, like to take her for the night? _

And _ that _ was how Gideon ended up driving her beaten up Jeep to Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ place for dinner. Princess Monstertruck was certainly _ not _in a Harrow approved booster seat. 

* * *

When Harrow opened the front door, smoke poured out. 

_ She has called me here to kill me, _ Gideon decided. _ She is going to burn the house down with both of us in it. Goodbye, cruel world — your coolest daughter, cut before her time. Never will she make it to professional league. Never will she get to see a beautiful girl topless. Never will she — _

“_Must _you be so crass?” asked Harrow crossly, and Gideon realized she had been speaking aloud. Even beneath layers of her gothy makeup, Gideon could see that Harrow’s face was doing that strange thing again: A flush ran from the visible slip of her collarbone to her neck, culminating in a dusting of color across the tops of her cheekbones. Gideon decided that it was prudent to look literally anywhere else, and instead focused on the plumes of grey smoke rolling out the front door. From deep within the house, a fire alarm was sounding. 

“You do know that murder-suicide is, like a one way ticket to F-town, right?” Asked Gideon. “Like, I totally get it, but then Palamedes would be valedictorian, and can you really allow that to happen?”

“I can feel my brain cells deteriorating just listening to you.”

“I have that effect on people. It’s called a high. Dopamine.” 

“A big word for a small brain,” said Harrow, turning back to go into the house without further comment. When Gideon didn’t immediately follow, she stuck her sharp little face around the door and said, “_ Well_?”

Well, indeed. 

Gideon had been planning to drop the baby and go, not be abused with lavish entreaties to follow Harrow into her lair. For some unknown reason — maybe because she was still carrying Princess Monstertruck, and it didn’t seem right to literally chuck her headfirst into a fiery inferno, or maybe because Harrow had already disappeared down the hall — Gideon followed. 

“I like what you’ve done to the place,” said Gideon conversationally. Or, she tried to; half of it came out in a hacking cough that had Harrow, obviously a vampire with no use for fresh air, wrinkling her nose. 

The trek led her to the kitchen, where the haze was so strong that her eyes stung. The kitchen was enormous, outfitted in dark cupboards and gleaming white countertops, including a big slab of _ marble _for an island. Gideon ran her fingers over it, tracing veins of black that threaded through the pale surface. 

The effect was only enhanced by the smoke clouding the room, billowing out from the open oven. On top of the stove was a pan of… _ something, _burnt beyond any kind of recognition. Could have been a casserole, could have been a brick of methamphetamines, could have been anything. Not even Corona Tridentarius could have convinced Gideon to eat it. 

“Wow. This is the kind of environment you want to bring Princess Monstertruck into? Our _ child_?”

“Will you just open a window,” Harrow snapped. And then, because she could clearly tell that Gideon was going to tell her to go fuck herself sideways, she amended the statement with a small, “Please?”

It was shock that drove Gideon to set the doll on the counter and move toward the window over the sink, her movements more akin to the muscle twitches of electrocution than any predetermined action. She opened the window then shoved her head out of it for good measure. When she was done, she had the pleasure of seeing Harrow standing on an ornate black chair that she had clearly pulled in from a dining room (because the Nonagesimuses were nothing if not the kind of people who had a _ dining room_), desperately fanning a towel at the screaming fire alarm with her puny arms. 

Wordlessly, Gideon crossed the room and took the towel from her, fanning it at the fire alarm with vigor. She let out a whoop of triumph when it stopped its infernal beeping. When she turned to taunt Harrow, the two of them were standing very close. With the aid of the chair, Harrow stood over a head taller than her, and Gideon was intensely grateful that there was nothing on Harrow’s flat chest to look at. 

Harrow’s hands twitched. That was the only way Gideon could describe it; for a moment her small hands darted, palms open, toward Gideon’s face, and Gideon thought she was about to be throttled for her impunity. Harrow must have thought the better of it, because as quickly as her hands came up, they came down again, balling into tiny fists at her side. With a rather haughty attitude for someone trying to scale a chair almost as tall as they were, Harrow clambered down, turned her back on Gideon, and began fussing with the dish on the stove. 

Gideon crossed her arms and leaned against the counter. “God, were you going to actually _ eat _ that? Were you going to feed it to _ me_? Was I right about the whole murder-suicide thing?”

“I was _ trying _ to prepare a nice meal before _ you _got here and ruined my appetite,” said Harrow, scraping the contents of the pan into a trash can that, of course, slid out from a dark cherry cabinet, because rich people made a game of hiding their garbage. 

“Well, you’ve killed Princess in the process,” said Gideon, gesturing to the doll. Laying on a cold slab of marble the size of Gideon’s bed, Princess Monstertruck looked like a sacrificial offering. “I think you’re supposed to run babies _ out _of burning buildings.” 

“You are the one who brought her in,” was Harrow’s smart reply, as if she hadn’t practically held Gideon at knife point to get her into the house in what Gideon could only assume was some kind of sick power play. 

Not knowing how to respond, Gideon threw her hands up. With the drone of the fire alarm gone, the sound of Harrow scraping the charred remains of her culinary endeavor filled the kitchen. Eventually, the fork she was using to excoriate the residue became mired in the debris, and Gideon watched Harrow attempt to fight with the un-budging fork for a solid minute before she gave a bone-deep sigh and dropped the entire pan into the trash can. 

Aiglamene would have throttled Gideon dead and then made her lick the pan clean for that kind of wastefulness, which is probably why Gideon said, with a preternatural level of stupidity, “Won’t your parents be pissed?” 

Harrow hip-checked the garbage cabinet, closing it with a definitive slam that seemed to reverberate through the room, and _ scoffed. _Harrow had the ability to imbue a scoff with enough acidity to melt the skin off of a grown man. It seemed to hang in the air, a haze of noxious vibes, as Harrow swept across the room toward where Princess Monstertruck still lay supine on the island. Due to the sheer size of the thing, Harrow nearly had to stand on her toes to reach the doll stranded in the center of the marble slab. 

The temperature of the room seemed to drop several degrees when Harrow turned to Gideon and said, “They won’t notice.” 

Maybe it was a trick of the light, or maybe it was because Gideon was seeing her through the weak veils of smoke still wafting from the oven, or maybe it was because Gideon _ had _ died from smoke inhalation and was currently hovering between the borders of Limbo and Hell, but in that moment, Harrow looked incomparably vulnerable. With the baby doll clutched loosely in her bony hands, Harrow appeared oddly childlike. Like the creepy kind of child that roamed haunted old Victorian mansions wailing and screaming, of course, but a child nonetheless. Both unbidden and unwanted, a strange sense of… _ protectiveness _washed over Gideon. 

Gideon wasn’t touching that with a ten foot pole. Instead, she started throwing open cabinets and rifling through drawers, disrupting pristine stacks of dishes and cookware in her search. 

“What are you doing?” Came Harrow’s sharp voice. 

“Right now? Starving,” lied Gideon, who had wolfed down no less than three crunchwrap supremes on the way over. She found what she was looking for and, with a whoop of triumph, hoisted a cast iron frying pan into the air.

“Not a griddle?” Asked Harrow drily. 

Ignoring her, Gideon began performing the same meticulous investigation on the fridge. Harrow had apparently decided that Gideon couldn't be trusted even with blunt objects (fair point; before this assignment, Gideon would have willingly bludgeoned herself to death before setting foot in Harrow's kitchen), and was hovering over Gideon's shoulder like a frantic spector. She trailed Gideon through the kitchen like a video game NPC right up until Gideon started cracking eggs into a bowl. 

"_What _ are you doing?" 

"Gonna have to think for yourself," drawled Gideon, scrambling the eggs with ferocity, "if you want to beat Sex Pal to valedictorian." 

"A vulgar nickname." 

"You should hear the ones I have for you." 

Harrow wrinkled her nose. She drummed her spindly fingers against Princess Monstertruck's back, watching imperiously as Gideon chopped bell peppers. "Spare me," she said at length. 

"Hey, there are a lot of girls who would kill to be in your place right now," said Gideon, pouring a solution of egg into the pan and watching it sizzle. Hell, Gideon would _definitely _kill to be making eggs for doe-eyed Dulcinea Septimus instead of Harrow's ungrateful ass. 

Strangely enough, Harrow looked like she, too, would like to kill someone. Her mouth was screwed up tightly, her burning eyes bearing down on the sizzling omelette like she could cook it with her gaze alone. "I cannot account for the lack of intellect and taste of others," she said scathingly.

Gideon want to hear a thing about taste from Harrow, of all people, but she kept her mouth shut. For all of her bluster, she still ate the omelette that Gideon deposited on her plate with only minimal complaining. 

They ate in silence, leaning against the ridiculous island. Harrow ate in diminutive bites, surprisingly ladylike in her ministrations, but eventually managed to put away the entire thing. Gideon wolfed hers down on instinct, and then spent longer than she would ever admit surreptitiously eyeing Harrow’s fragile wrists, the sharp flex of bone under skin with each tilt of her fork. With cooking abilities like hers, Gideon could see why she weighed less than a drowned rat. 

Halfway through, Princess Monstertruck started to wail. Her tinny voice seemed to bounce around the empty kitchen, and Gideon was stuck bouncing her around while Harrow did the dishes in the background. It was disgustingly, disturbingly domestic. 

Gideon did not mention the fact that the whole reason she had come over was so that _ Harrow _could be the one taking care of the doll. Instead, she pretended not to watch as Harrow quietly put away the dishes. When she closed the final cupboard, the kitchen was exactly as it had originally been: sleek, clean, empty. 

“Thank you,” said Harrow quietly. 

Gideon nearly dropped Princess Monstertruck in shock. Harrow must have seen this, because she scoffed and swept across the room to pluck the doll from Gideon’s arms. 

The doll immediately let out a scream. 

“What was that you were saying earlier,” Gideon goaded, “about taste?”

Harrow shot her a murderous glare. “You are insufferable,” she said. She gave the doll an awkward, experimental bounce. After a few moments, she looked up at Gideon with those dark, piercing eyes, and said, “How do you do it?”

“What can I say,” Gideon said, “kids love me.” 

And for some reason, they did. Gideon was not qualified to take care of herself, a child, or even a plant, and yet grubby fisted kids everywhere seemed to flock to her, from her neighbor’s toddler to Mr. Quinn’s middle school aged spawn that he occasionally dragged to class with him. Harrow, Gideon could only imagine, served a similar function to children and old people as a scarecrow did in a field.

“It’s not a child,” said Harrow mercilessly, voice raised over the cacophonous shrieks. “It is a doll.” 

“Got a pair of pliers? I could probably yank the voice box out.”

“Gideon Nav, if you’re not going to take this _ seriously—” _

_ “_You’ll cut my heart out and feast on it like carrion, yeah, yeah. Here,” Gideon said, stepping closer. Before any kind of self preservation instinct could set in, her hand was on Harrow’s smaller one, shifting the position. “If you just — yeah, like that. Okay, now try that again, but a little bit slower — yeah, like that. Good.”

It took a moment of awkward fumbling, but soon, the baby grew quiet. As did Harrow, her perpetually furrowed brow now furrowed in concentration rather than disapproval. Her dark eyes were trained on the baby doll, as if she could glare it into submission if she just tried hard enough. 

The baby was quiet, and Gideon’s hand was still on Harrow’s. 

Instead of withdrawing it and backing away slowly, as one did with a bear or any other kind of feral beast, Gideon blurted, “Your hands are _ freezing_.” 

Harrow jolted. The baby screamed. Gideon yanked her hands back. 

It took another five minutes to get the doll to calm down again, and this time Gideon kept her hands to herself.

* * *

Being in Harrow’s room was even weirder the second time. 

Little had changed. If anything, the room had gotten messier; this was a supreme shock to Gideon, who was used to Harrowhark Nonagesimus, control freak extraordinaire. Her three-ring binder was immaculate. Her notes were color coded and alphabetized. Gideon had once seen her meticulously snapping pencil lead in half to make sure it was the same length. 

As she watched Harrow wrestle an armful of dark clothing from the edge of her bed to her desk chair, Gideon wondered if she was having a stroke. 

The desk chair overfloweth, yet it was still the perfect mattress for a robotic babydoll. Gideon set the doll down and then backed away slowly. Harrow held her breath. 

They let out a sigh of relief at exactly the same time. It was so perfectly timed, so in sync, that Gideon couldn’t help but let out a small snort of laughter. Across the room, from where she leaned against one one of the poles of her four-poster bed, Harrow’s small mouth crooked into half a smile. 

For Harrow, it was the same as bursting into belly-aching, rib-bruising laughter. A quirk at the corner of her delicate lips, an uneven, unsure grin. It was a small kiss of beauty to an otherwise detestable face, and Gideon needed to leave, _ now. _

“I have to go,” Gideon said abruptly. 

The smile vanished, disappearing instead into a thin line. Harrow flattened her lips, eyes darting to the window. Weak sunlight still bled through the gaps between the curtains, the sky outside fading into pink and peach. 

Gideon didn’t _ need _ an excuse to leave. But she _ had _ruined the moment, so she said, “Gotta study. Big chem exam on Monday.”

Gideon expected dry insults, some harsh assault on her intellect. Harrow didn’t think she had two brain cells to rub together, and had never had a problem with making that known. She did _ not _expect Harrow to raise one dark eyebrow and ask, “With Quinn?” 

“Uh, yeah?” Gideon figured that was an obvious connotation of the word _ study _ . Gideon was perfectly content to skate through the rest of her classes in mediocrity. Her class standing was perfectly average, high enough to keep her on the team and gain entry at a local college, low enough to keep her out of the arms race for valedictorian. Gideon had better things to do with her reckless youth than _ study. _

Magnus Quinn was the exception to this. Maybe because he was the first teacher to ever treat her as anything other than a colossal pain in the ass, or maybe because he knew what it was like to have an adopted child, Gideon wasn’t sure. All she knew was that he _ saw something in her _ and _ believed in her, _ which was a giant bowl of _ yuck _ that made the fatherless Gideon want to fold like a lawn chair and cry. She didn’t necessarily care about impressing him, but the thought of _ disappointing him _made her stomach turn. 

He also happened to teach a class that occasionally allowed Gideon to blow up which, okay, _ metal _as hell for a guy who lived in sweater vests. 

Wordlessly, Harrow slipped away from her bed and began rooting around for something on one of the bookshelves. Each movement triggered a small cascade of papers and books. Miraculously, none of the displaced items made it to the floor, but Gideon still found her gaze darting toward Princess Monstertruck in fear. 

A thick binder materialized in front of her face. 

“Do you want it or not?” 

“Uh,” said Gideon eloquently, flipping through the binder as if it were priceless treasure. Which it was, she realized: rows and rows of cramped handwriting swimming around immaculate charts and graphs. “What…” 

“I took that class last year,” said Harrow in a bored tone, because _ of course she did. _Judging by the stack of textbooks towering next to her nightstand, she was all AP this year. 

Gideon flipped through the book experimentally. A week ago, she would have assumed this was all part of some elaborate ploy on Harrow’s part. Plug as much wrong information into Gideons’ brain as possible and then sit back cackling with glee as Gideon’s GPA, position on the team, and shot at college were all yanked out from under her. A flawed scenario, Gideon now realized, but only because Harrow was incapable of laughter. 

At the back of her mind, Gideon remembered Camilla’s, _ Maybe you should give her the benefit of the doubt. _

“Thanks,” said Gideon, snapping the binder closed. “You and Sex Pal had better watch out—” she waved the binder in the air “— I’m coming for your spot.” 

A fleeting, wicked grin touched Harrow’s mouth. “How cute,” she said drily, “that you think Sextus has a chance.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! As always, comments are always appreciated, and you can find me on tumblr at [strangehunger](%E2%80%9Cstrangehunger.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D). 
> 
> Next time, we get a sleepover.


	4. it’s not that difficult

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Questions?” Asked Harrow. 
> 
> Harrow was a surprisingly good teacher. Gideon had expected draconian rule and rulers to the back of her knuckles and not in, like, the sexy Catholic school way. Her tutelage was peppered with the occasional accusation of brainlessness or perversion, but Gideon couldn’t deny the spike of pride she felt when one of Harrow’s eyebrows hitched higher than the other and she conceded, “Well done.” Sometimes she would get sidetracked and end up on some kind of tangent chock full of polysyllabic words that Gideon flew over Gideon’s head. 
> 
> Maybe it was because Gideon was trying to find something to distract her other than the fact that the highlighter tucked up behind Harrow’s ear accentuated the line of piercings stretching from cartilage to lobe, or maybe it was because force-feeding her brain half a semester’s worth of chemistry was causing her to short circuit, but Gideon found herself blurting, “Why are you doing this?“

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience, everyone! I promised a sleepover, and a sleepover you will get. 
> 
> CW for: mentions of parental death, nightmares.

So maybe Gideon didn’t study. 

Maybe she went home on Saturday night, ate half a pizza by herself, and played video games all night. She was seventeen. And she was  _ kind of  _ a parent. And early that day, she had walked into the devil’s lair and out again (and, though she shoved it to the back of her mind, had found the devil  _ pretty  _ for a nanosecond), and therefore she deserved some kind of downtime. 

She regretted the pizza the next morning, when Camilla Hect bodily dragged her from her nice warm bed and out into the cold, harsh, unforgiving world for a morning jog. 

Hands on her knees, sweating bullets, Gideon panted, “I hate running.” 

“It’s good for you,” was Camilla’s automatic reply, who was the kind of person to, like, eat her vegetables and go on morning jogs and endure all other forms of misery because it was  _ good for you.  _ Other than the faint sheen of sweat at her temples, she looked completely unphased at the fact that the winding trek she had just dragged Gideon on would have put a marine to shame. “It’s pretty, huh?”

“Stunning,” gasped Gideon, still facing the ground. 

Camilla’s path of choice would have taken them to the high school. That plan had been foiled by Gideon, whose lack of dignity meant that she was  _ not  _ above simply lying on the ground like a corpse until Camilla dragged her up and turned them on a different path. Instead she had pushed Gideon (master of her own demise!) on an intense trek that had brought them up a hilly running trail that culminated in a stunning vista of the town, spread out like a storybook. It was gorgeous. Gideon wanted to vomit. 

“How’s the baby doing?” 

“Nauseous.”

Camilla rolled her eyes. “Not you.” She meandered from the trail toward the overlook. Gideon followed, careful to stay further from the edge. Her legs felt like jelly. At least if she fell off of a cliff, she could get out of her chemistry exam. 

Objectively, the area was nice. It was the kind of place that brought out joggers and bird-watchers in the mornings, and horny teenagers looking for a make out spot in the evening. Gideon, tragically, had never been among that number. 

“I don’t think Harrow has disemboweled it yet,” said Gideon. If she could squinted, she could just see the big, dark blot of the Nonagesimus house just to the edge of town. In her mind’s eye, there would have been a perpetual rainstorm hovering over it. Instead there was just a crisp, clear spring sky. “Who knows. Maybe that was her plan. Send me away with her notes and then use the distraction to cut out its guts and use them to tell fortunes, I don’t know.” 

Camilla wrinkled her nose. “Gross, Nine.” 

“You’re telling me, I have to raise a baby with her.” 

“I shudder to think of either of you with a child,” said Camilla drily. Gideon was ready to protest that, lawn mowing experiments aside, she was an  _ excellent  _ mother, when Camilla said, dark eyes turning on Gideon inquisitively, “She let you borrow her notes?”

She had. Gideon had barely cracked the binder open, but she  _ had  _ fallen asleep with the monstrosity of a thing next to her head and a plate of pizza balanced on her stomach. Studying by osmosis, right? Foolproof.

Had Gideon any kind of sense, she would smack that baby into the nearest copy machine and start selling it. Having a binder full of Harrow’s notes was like having permission to print money; Gideon could have a one-woman smuggling ring, and the school would have its highest test score average of all time. Win-win situation. 

After Gideon told her this story, emphasis on the fact that Harrow had  _ dragged her into a burning building,  _ Camilla simply said, “Told you she wasn’t all that bad.” 

“Yeah, well, it’s not  _ your  _ baby in her bony clutches,” said Gideon, conveniently shoving the memory of Harrow attempting to cradle the doll into the ever growing dumpster fire of shit she did not want to think about at the back of her mind. She kicked at a rock and watched it bounce over the edge of the overlook in a cloud of dust. She had seen more of Harrow in the last week than she had hoped to see in her entire lifetime and lived to tell the tale. Gideon had either died and stumbled into some kind of fucked up afterlife, or Harrow really  _ wasn’t  _ as bad as she seemed. 

Gideon shivered, not knowing which was worse. 

Camilla took a swig off her water bottle and said, “Time to head back down,” proving that perhaps there  _ were  _ fates worse than Harrow. 

* * *

“It’s not that difficult.”

Gideon got about halfway through a venomous  _ You’re not that difficult,  _ before she realized that it was a lie and cut herself off. 

She was sitting cross legged atop Harrow’s four poster bed. She had not burst into flames. She had not gone catatonic on impact. She had not been sucked into the bed and spat out in chunks of blood and guts and viscera Freddie Krueger style. The mattress was incredible, the black duvet disgustingly soft. It was like she was floating on a goth cloud. 

Across from her, sitting up ramrod straight against a plethora of dark pillows, sat Harrow. A chemistry textbook lay open in her lap like a tome of forbidden lore. Gideon half expected her to start speaking in tongues and summon a demon. Hell, the mess of diagrams splattered across the pages of the book might as well have been occult sigils, for all Gideon knew. 

The only thing that separated the two of them were miles of black blanket and Harrow’s binder of notes, the inside of which had been carefully dismembered. Papers lay scattered across the bed, clustered together by topic. They had already gone through a huge stack of them, and Gideon’s head was starting to spin. She was going to be seeing chemical compounds in her sleep. 

With an air of resignation, Gideon had allowed herself to be guided into the belly of the Nonagesimus house when she arrived to take Princess Monstertruck for the night. Harrow had texted her to bring the binder with, which Gideon considered to be some kind of sick power play. She had come armed with the binder as if it were here only leverage in an intense hostage situation.  _ Drop the baby!  _ She had imagined shouting, suspending the binder headfirst over a body of water. 

The baby still lay on the makeshift crib that was Harrow’s desk chair. Every now and then Princess Monstertruck would start crying and one of them would have to “change” or “feed” her. The bags under Harrow’s eyes told Gideon that the thing had cried on and off all night, and Gideon felt a touch of sympathy. 

Of course, every now and then Harrow would glare down at her and say acidly, “It wouldn’t be difficult if you were willing to put your half of a brain to any kind of use,” and any sympathy Gideon felt for her evaporated. 

A week ago, that kind of comment would have had Gideon ready to kick Harrow’s bony ass across the hall and back. A week ago, that kind of comment would have culminated in a bout of name-calling that landed someone (Gideon, always Gideon) in detention.

A week ago, Gideon wouldn’t have been in Harrow’s bedroom, eating junk food and learning about Lewis Structures. 

“Hey, I’ve been busy raising  _ our child _ ,” leveled back Gideon. 

“Her loss,” was Harrow’s simple reply. She had a pink highlighter tucked behind one ear. Gideon, who had blocked out all memories of Harrow wearing anything other than black, could not quite process it. It was like seeing a glitch in the Matrix. 

The only thing that had Gideon biting her tongue on some acerbic retort was the fact that Harrow had crawled out of her crypt to spend  _ two and a half hours  _ helping Gideon study for this exam, and Gideon had mostly shown thanks by buying a pizza and doodling in the margins of Harrow’s notes and generally being a sarcastic asshole. Instead, she allowed Harrow to hammer as much chemistry as possible into her brain, knowing that by the end of the night she would feel like she had done the mental equivalent of running a marathon. 

“Questions?” Asked Harrow. 

Harrow was a surprisingly good teacher. Gideon had expected draconian rule and rulers to the back of her knuckles and not in, like, the sexy Catholic school way. Her tutelage was peppered with the occasional accusation of brainlessness or perversion, but Gideon couldn’t deny the spike of pride she felt when one of Harrow’s eyebrows hitched higher than the other and she conceded, “Well done.” Sometimes she would get sidetracked and end up on some kind of tangent chock full of polysyllabic words that Gideon flew over Gideon’s head. 

Maybe it was because Gideon was trying to find something to distract her other than the fact that the highlighter tucked up behind Harrow’s ear accentuated the line of piercings stretching from cartilage to lobe, or maybe it was because force-feeding her brain half a semester’s worth of chemistry was causing her to short circuit, but Gideon found herself blurting, “Why are you doing this?”

Harrow, already quiet and calculated in her movements, went preternaturally still. Gideon knew this side of her well, a snake coiled tightly before striking. First the calm, then the venom. It was the same rocky facade that Gideon had encountered all throughout their childhood, no matter how she might try to push and prod Harrow into a reaction. She had never quite seen Harrow crest that bump of agitation, never seen her unrestrained in any capacity, not even anger. With Harrow, it was always either icy disregard or insidious irritation, but never anything raw, never anything  _ real.  _

Something within Harrow closed at that question, something Gideon hadn’t even realized had been open. 

“Would you rather fail the class?” Asked Harrow, voice carefully, cuttingly devoid of emotion. And then, like a blade between ribs, “Griddle?”

The two studied in near-silence for the remainder of the evening. 

* * *

_ “Gideon.”  _

And then, louder, “ _ GIDEON.” _

There was a hand on Gideon’s shoulder, painfully gentle. 

Gideon’s body jerked upright at the touch, her heart thundering in her chest. She could hear her own blood roaring through every vessel in her body; it roiled, hot and heavy and drowning everything else out. A spectacular sensation of pain bloomed at her temple, white hot and violent before giving way to a deep, dull throb. It reminded her of headlights, a beacon of bright light before the collision, before the shattering of glass and the crunch of metal, before —

A drop of  _ something _ hit the skin of Gideon’s neck, warm and wet and  _ gross _ . 

“Oh,  _ fuck. _ ”

Gideon scrambled into a sitting position, still dazed. A fuzzy, dark shape that she just barely registered as Harrow hovered over her, wiping the back of her tiny hand across her face. In the dim light of the room, Gideon could just see a dark line dripping from Harrow’s nose to her mouth to her chin. Gideon’s hand flew to her own neck. It was only as she was wiping the slick substance from her throat and onto the duvet that Gideon realized it was Harrow’s blood. Something equally warm and wet touched at her face, and Gideon could only  _ pray  _ that none of Harrow’s bodily fluids had made their way there. 

_ I’m dead,  _ she thought.  _ I’m so, so,  _ so  _ dead.  _ And not because of the merciless reel of car crashes playing out in the theater of her mind, but because she had just head butted Harrowhark Nonagesimus in the face. _ I’m too young to die.  _

“Shit, shit,  _ shit,”  _ said Gideon. And then, because she only knew how to make the situation  _ worse,  _ she began to pull her T-shirt over her head. 

“Gideon Nav,  _ what  _ are you  _ doing _ ?” Said Harrow, her voice rising in hysteria on the final word. It was the most emotion Gideon had ever prompted from her, and she realized suddenly, violently, that she was mid-striptease on Harrow’s  _ bed.  _

Gideon changed her mind. She very much wanted to die. 

“Shit, Harrow, I’m so—”

“If you  _ take your shirt off,  _ so help me  _ God—” _

“I’m — you need something to stop the blood—”

“ _ Gideon. Stop.”  _

“I—”

“Gideon, you’re crying.” 

Gideon stopped. 

It was probably the first time since kindergarten that Gideon had obeyed anything Harrow said without a fight. She figured that Harrow would be getting her rocks off over it. Instead, Harrow was staring at her over a bloody nose, dark eyes focused and intent. Either the disorientation of the nightmare or the impact from the collision of forehead against nose had Gideon’s vision swimming, because Harrow almost looked  _ concerned _ . 

Harrow’s bedroom dripped with darkness. Gideon didn’t know when she had drifted off, or for how long she had been knocked out. A pale sliver of moonlight encroached on the room through the open curtains of the window, but otherwise it was dark. A sheet of crumpled notebook paper bit into her side. She wiped at her tired eyes, and her hands came away wet with tears she had no memory of shedding. Better than Harrow’s blood, but only marginally. 

When Gideon realized that she must have fallen asleep in Harrow’s fucking  _ bed _ , she wanted to die all over again. The only conciliation was that her struggle with her shirt had never progressed over her head, and so she carefully pulled the T-shirt back down to cover her abdomen. 

“I should go,” said Gideon into the silence. 

She had never fully ruled out the window as an escape route — probably a good thing, because no sooner was she off the bed and jamming her feet into the wrong shoes than Harrow was standing in the doorway. With blood still dripping from her face, she looked like a spector, Gideon’s own personal haunt. 

“ _ Stop.”  _

The only alternative was straight-up battering Harrow down, and Gideon supposed she had inflicted enough bodily injury on Harrow this evening. Despite years of feuding, Gideon had never actually  _ hit  _ Harrow. Their interactions almost never lapsed into the physical. Harrow preferred to orchestrate elaborate schemes of mental torture, and Gideon had spent years holding back on the assumption that if she were ever to outright hit Harrow, she wouldn’t be able to stop. 

That was apparently not the case, because all Gideon wanted to do now was find something to stem the bleeding. The fact that they had never come to blows made it all the worse to see Harrow’s nose dripping blood and mucus and to know that it was her fault. By tomorrow, that would be bruising something awful. Gideon was certain she wouldn’t see it though; if Harrow didn’t kill her now and dump the body in a landfill, Gideon was going to go off-grid and spend the rest of her life whipping herself in penance and humiliation like a twelfth century monk. 

The fact that Harrow wouldn’t budge made Gideon think it was the former, which is why she let out a croaked, “Harrow, I’m—”

“What are you going to do?” Harrow demanded in that lofty, imperious tone of hers.. Regardless of Harrow’s physical stature, she was  _ spiritually  _ looking down on Gideon, of that Gideon was sure. “Drive home?”

“Uh, that was the plan, unless you wanted to kill me first. But let me tell you, I’m not going without a fight.” 

“It’s the middle of the night.” 

“Yeah, roads are clear.” Gideon liked to avoid driving at night for the same reason she hated the month of March and the same reason she woke up slick with her own sweat in the middle of the night every now and then. (Well,  _ one  _ of the reasons, at least.) Given the current situation though, it might be worth the risk. “It’s a straight shot.”

Harrow stared at Gideon as if her head was screwed on backwards, which was not very far off from how Gideon felt. “No,” Harrow said, voice flat. 

“No?” Gideon repeated in in disbelief. 

“Nav,” said Harrow, her voice so taut it seemed ready to snap, “You’re not — you don’t seem quite well at the moment.” She spoke carefully, her words like jagged pieces of a puzzle she couldn’t quite fit into place. “You can stay here.” 

Oh. Gideon understood now. This was a nightmare. She just had yet to wake up. 

“Not —  _ here, _ ” elaborated Harrow, her dark gaze darting to Gideon, her bed, and then back to Gideon. “We have a guest room.” 

Like Harrow’s room, the guest room was ridiculously large. It had the bleached, artificial feeling of an upper class hotel. The contrast between Harrow’s room, messy and dark, was striking. The duvet was so startlingly white that it hurt Gideon’s eyes. 

Harrow hovered in the guest room doorway as Gideon texted Aiglamene, awkwardly pointing out the obvious as if she truly thought that Gideon was impaired enough to not recognize a nightstand. Gideon cut her off just short of providing a guided tour of the en-suite bathroom with a quick quip about how she was perfectly capable of wiping her own ass, to which Harrow leveled an accusation of vulgarity. The exchange was a relief, a return to stable ground. 

“Hey,” said Gideon, just as Harrow was making her way into the hallway. Harrow paused in the doorway, one hand on the knob. Her face was clean of blood; later, Gideon would see the red tinged tissues wadded up in the en-suite bathroom and feel another rush of guilt at the sight. Now, she said, “Sorry about your nose.” 

Harrow stared at her. Her knuckles went pale around the doorknob, and then she said with finality, “Get some rest.”

She closed the door gently behind herself. 

* * *

By the next morning, the gentle hands that had shaken Gideon from sleep the night before were gone. Instead, Harrow ripped the blanket off of the bed with all the tenderness of a bucket of ice water to the face. Gideon fumbled at the blanket, eager to protect her modesty (which, okay, bullshit, but she was  _ cold _ ). Were she not fighting a violent blush herself, it might have been funny to see the way Harrow’s face went up in flames when she realized that the only thing Gideon was wearing under the blanket was a bandeau and a pair of briefs. 

What? It wasn’t as if  _ Harrow _ , who was thin as a stick and perpetually dressed for her own funeral, would have had any pajamas she could have borrowed. 

Harrow dropped the blanket and stormed out. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! This one was a little bit shorter — this is technically the first half of one chapter, which would have ended up being massive, so I split them in two. I think the pacing will work better this way, and that means there should be less time between updates. 
> 
> Next chapter we get Gideon Nav, a miserable babe magnet.


	5. don’t show up in a hearse this time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turned out that there were worse fates in life than being trapped in a car with Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Getting out of her car in front of the entire school was one of them. 
> 
> ___________________________________
> 
> In which high school gossip is horrible and Gideon is the babe magnet she always pretends to be. 
> 
> (But she’s not the only one.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Gideon the Ninth Discord server bullied me :/ So here is chapter five, enjoy it everyone! Thank you for your patience between chapters!

Gideon spent the entire morning in an abyss of self-pity, tiptoeing around the Nonagesimus household despite Harrow’s sharp assurance that they were the only two home. Her first time in a girl’s bed, and it had to be _ Harrow’s _bed. The thought made Gideon want to take a shower. 

Which she did, thanking God the entire time that she had a change of clothes in the gym bag thrown haphazardly in the back of the Jeep. Aiglamene had left her a gruff voicemail about taking care of herself and not doing anything too stupid and ended it with a cryptic hint at what Gideon would endure if she missed first period. Gideon only cried a little bit in the shower, half at Aiglamene’s rare display of maternal concern and half out of relief that she wasn’t going to have to walk into first period wearing Harrow’s twenty sizes too small Hot Topic-couture. 

The minty scent of the shampoo in the en-suite was strangely familiar until Gideon remembered bending her head toward Harrow’s on Saturday and nearly getting a mouthful of her dark hair. That line of thought took her so far into nope-town that Gideon had to restrain herself from squeezing the contents of the bottle down the drain. 

Harrow’s idea of a well rounded breakfast was two cups of black coffee slammed back in quick succession. Gideon’s normally entailed a similar concept, different execution; in any other situation, Gideon would have washed a protein bar down with an energy drink and called it good. Instead, she harassed a half-awake, wet-haired Harrow into at least picking at a peanut-butter smeared piece of toast. 

By the time Harrow locked the front door behind them (with a fucking _ skeleton key, _of all things), Gideon had lived a lifetime. Harrow took one look at her and said, “I’ll drive.” 

Gideon, whose entire being felt like an exposed nerve when she thought back to the previous night, let it go without a fight for once. 

Harrow’s car was small, black, and electric. Gideon had to fold herself in half to fit in. The front panel looked like the inside of a spaceship, piloted by a bony, bitchy alien. Unlike Gideon’s shitty Jeep, essentially a shitty frame joined together by side doors, the thing was sleek, pristine, and reeked of money. 

After tossing her backpack and Princess Monstertruck into the back seat, the only thing Harrow said to Gideon was a pointed, “_Seatbelt_.” Gideon had a half-assed retort on her tongue, which she nearly bit in half when Harrow reached behind her and pressed a bony hand to the top of the passenger seat. Harrow twisted, too focused on watching through the back window as she pulled out to notice that Gideon was ready to launch herself through the windshield. It was excruciating, a cruel, oblivious mockery of the kind of smooth move Gideon would put into play if she ever had a hot girl in her front seat. 

A century passed before Harrow turned back around. Gideon had spent the whole time studiously avoiding looking at the line of Harrow’s neck, or the way her damp hair clung to her skin, or the faint bruise blooming at the corner of one temple, a dark memory of their collision the night before. Harrow flicked her dark gaze from Gideon’s face, down to her chest, and then back up again. Just when Gideon thought she was about to cave in from the weight of Harrow’s gaze, Harrow muttered, “Seatbelt,” again, and turned back to the road. 

The ride to school wasn’t nearly as awkward as it should have been, which somehow made it worse. They rode in near-silence until Harrow jammed at a few of the backlit buttons, filling the car with the cacophonous pounding of some metal band. 

“You’ll wake the baby,” Gideon joked. Instead of some sharp retort, Harrow wordlessly turned the volume down. 

Just a few blocks from the high school, when Gideon was almost in the clear — so close! — Harrow asked, “Did you sleep well?” 

Gideon should have thrown herself out the window when she had the chance. 

“Like a baby,” was her reply. Harrow shifted in her seat, and Gideon could just _ feel _Harrow preparing for a spiel, and that was the last thing they needed. Gideon cut that shit off at the knees with a quick, “Woke up screaming for boobs and food every two hours.” 

Harrow’s knuckles went pale around the steering wheel. “How base,” was her only response, and Gideon found herself thanking God that she didn’t have to sit through five minutes of Harrow trying to _ comfort _her. 

Turned out that there were worse fates in life than being trapped in a car with Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Getting _ out _of her car in front of the entire school was one of them. 

It felt like all eyes were on her as she awkwardly unfurled herself from the passenger seat. Logically, Gideon knew that the majority of the student body _ probably _ didn’t give a shit about whose car she arrived to school in (though the nosy fuckers _ absolutely did _), but that didn’t mean that she needed an audience for her walk of shame from Harrow’s car to the front steps. 

While Gideon was busy conducting elaborate excuses ranging anywhere from a flat tire to an outright abduction, Harrow perfunctorily pulled both her backpack and Princess Monstertruck from the backseat of the car. “I’ll hold on to her,” Harrow muttered to Gideon, apparently oblivious to the fact that Gideon would have hurled the doll onto the freeway if it would get her out of this current spectacle. 

“Uh, thanks,” said Gideon. Was that cheerleader leaning against that grey Volkswagen watching her? What about the group of stoners huddled around a van that should have been impounded three fender-benders ago?

“What do you have for first period?”

“English.” The cheerleader was definitely watching her. Jury was still out on the group of stoners; two of them stared at Gideon through glassy eyes, but God only knew what they were seeing. The more time she spent leaning against Harrow’s car and talking to her as if the two of them hadn’t hated each other for over ten years, the more aware she was of the number of people passing through the school parking lot. That girl from her chem class, that guy from trig. The lunch lady smoking a cigarette by the front gates. 

“We’ll discuss…_ her _after second period,” said Harrow. She slammed the car door and headed toward the red-bricked jaws of the main building. Her tiny legs moved surprisingly fast, and Gideon awkwardly trailed after her, intensely aware of every neck turned, craned, and whiplashed toward them as they made their way across the parking lot and into the red maw of the high school. 

Gideon wasn’t an idiot. She knew how it looked to show up to school with mussed clothing and unstyled hair in somebody else’s car. She also knew that by lunch she would be fending off a hoard of gossip-hungry classmates and teammates with a baseball bat. In that moment, Gideon would have done anything to cut the rumors off in its infancy, and the last thing she wanted was to _ encourage _them. 

And yet she still felt a strange twinge of disappointment when the warning bell rang and Harrow disappeared down the hallway without a backwards glance. 

* * *

Corona Tridentarius was sitting on Gideon’s desk. 

Technically it wasn’t _ Gideon’s _ desk. Officially, they had open seating, but Gideon had been planting her unhappy ass there for the last week. And anyway, Corona batted her lashes and crooked a stiletto-nailed finger at Gideon the second she stepped foot in the room, so if it hadn’t been her seat before, it sure as hell was _ now. _

As Gideon neared, Corona extended one bronzed hand. For half a second, she thought Corona expected her to hold it or kiss it (either of which _ she absolutely fucking would have done _), until she realized that slipped between Corona’s perfectly manicured fingers was a note. 

Gideon took it. It was pretty, purple, and _ perfumed, _and Gideon definitely wasn’t going to shove it under her pillow the second she got home. It was an invitation to a party, written in big, bubbly letters that filled as much of the lavender stationary as possible. It had been written in sparkly purple gel pen — most likely the same sparkly purple gel pen that Corona was currently winding one of her golden locks around.

Gideon had never before been envious of a pen.

“So,” said Corona. Her voice dripped like honey from the comb, and Gideon _ loved _honey. “Are you coming?” She asked, as if Gideon wouldn’t willingly follow her to the end of the world like she was some kind of tall, hot Pied Piper. 

“I’ll think about it,” said Gideon, shooting for hard to get and inevitably landing on lame. 

Corona’s pink mouth curved into a smile, sweet and slow and seductive. She leaned in closer to Gideon, and Gideon caught a heady whiff of perfume, the same one that had been used on the invitation. Gideon wanted to drink a bottle of it. “What’s there to think about?” 

Probably whether or not she could be in Corona Tridentarius’ _ house _ where she _ lived _without dying of thirst.

Before Gideon could say anything, Corona gave another blinding smile and said, “I’ll see you there.” Her jewel-like eyes drifted from Gideon’s face to somewhere just over her shoulder, where her gaze lingered for a moment. She uncrossed her perfect legs and pushed herself up from the desk. “Don’t show up in a hearse this time,” she murmured. She lifted a tawny hand and patted Gideon’s cheek, and then strode off across the room to sit with her sickly sister. 

Gideon’s face burned as if it had been slapped. Whether it was from the blessing of having Corona Tridentarius’ gorgeous hand on her face or from the embarrassment at knowing that her morning commute had already spread through the school, she wasn’t sure.

_ Don’t show up in a hearse this time. _Something in the pit of Gideon’s stomach twisted at that, a clenched fist in her intestines. Embarrassment? Shame?

Harrow’s book bag fell into the seat next to Gideon’s like the blade of a guillotine. Princess Monstertruck was set more gently onto the desk, probably because there were already two other screaming baby dolls in the room and Harrow didn’t want to add a third. 

“Put your tongue back in your mouth,” muttered Harrow darkly. She spoke to Gideon, but her gaze was fixed on the glittering beacon of light that was Corona, draped over her plastic desk chair like a queen on a throne, halfway across the room.

When Harrow finally lifted her eyes to glare at Gideon, they were dark and tired. Gideon was hit with the usual impulse to make some kind of smart-ass remark about her staying up all night to suck the blood from poor, unsuspecting souls that wandered onto her grounds, until she remembered that those bruise colored bags pooling under Harrow’s eyes were her fault. 

They didn’t talk to each other the entire class, and Gideon realized what that strange knot in the pit of her stomach was. 

Guilt. 

* * *

Harrow didn’t say a single word to Gideon until the bell rang. 

Gideon reached across the vast expanse of aisle that stretched between their desks, intent on grabbing Princess Monstertruck and running. Harrow’s head swiveled toward her so fast that Gideon half expected it to snap clean off and go rolling across the dirty linoleum. 

“Don’t touch her,” warned Harrow in a tone of voice that implied Gideon was lucky to keep her hand attached to her wrist. She slung the baby doll over one arm. At one point, that might have been enough to set Princess Monstertruck into a bout of high-frequency screeching, but Gideon had a strong suspicion that they were starting to wear either her battery or her voice box down. Either way, Gideon couldn’t complain. 

She didn’t know what she expected Harrow to say to her next, except maybe some barbed comment about Gideon’s limited intelligence or subpar appearance, or the fact that she couldn’t keep her head screwed on correctly when there was a hot girl in a five mile radius. 

Harrow looked her up and down for a moment. “Good luck on your test,” she said decisively. Gideon watched in stunned silence as Harrow swept out of the room, wishing more than anything in the world that Harrow _ had _insulted her. 

* * *

“Poor Gideon,” Dulcinea cooed. “Poor, poor baby.” Her fragile hand fluttered at Gideon’s temple, pale against the flame of Gideon’s hair. She pushed Gideon’s hair back from her forehead, peering at the bloom of marbled blues and purples and yellows on Gideon’s hairline. The impact zone of Harrow’s skull against Gideon’s had slowly morphed into a fabulous bruise that Gideon had been unsuccessfully attempting to hide with her floppy, unstyled hair. 

Gideon had a sudden, cruel recollection of sitting on this same bench during lunch the week before, burning with jealousy as Dulcinea fawned over a fake baby doll. Right now, sitting in the quad with Dulcinea’s hands in her hair and Palamedes watching on with said baby doll in his hands, Gideon very much wished that Harrow had killed her a week ago and put her out of her misery early. 

For his part, Palamedes was being very decent about the whole situation, which made it undeniably worse. His only response to Dulcinea dragging Gideon over to their makeshift picnic on the quad benches was a courteous greeting. Had Gideon’s pseudo-date with one of the most hypnotic girls in school been derailed by arguably her biggest competition, Gideon would have thrown rocks at them until they left. 

Instead, she was being coddled like a dumb puppy by Dulcinea’s caring hands while poor Palamedes was cuckolded on the sidelines. The only person she could at this point was Harrow, who might as well have taken a hammer to her forehead — until she remembered that Harrow was walking around sporting a matching shiner, and Gideon had to face the fact that she truly was the master of her own demise. 

“How did it happen?” The pad of Dulcinea’s thumb skated over the sensitive skin of Gideon’s forehead, and Gideon just barely held back a flinch. This only sent Dulcinea into another bout of _ Poor baby this, poor baby that. _Gideon had a sneaking suspicion that Dulcinea had done it on purpose, but she was so stupid over the senior that she didn’t even care. 

She was also so stupid over the senior that there was no way in Hell she was going to tell her that she had slept at Harrow’s _ house _ in her _ bed _ and then ridden to school in her _ car _like some kind of medieval damsel riding sidesaddle. Dulcinea hadn’t given any indication that she had heard the gossip of the hour, and Gideon wasn’t going to tell her now.

“Uh. A ball?”

Over Dulcinea’s shoulder, Palamedes looked up sharply. Sirens went off in Gideon’s (currently under-utilized) brain. 

“A ball?” He repeated. Not mocking, not sarcastic, just calm and calculating as usual. Gideon could practically hear his brain whirring away like the inside of a computer, lines of complex calculations swimming before his eyes.

“Yep,” said Gideon. 

From behind the thick rims of his glasses, Palamedes scrutinized her. Gideon looked away, dropping her gaze back to Dulcinea’s electric eyes, framed by eyelashes so thick you could sleep in them. She didn’t know what kind of data Palamedes was plugging into that internal spreadsheet of his, and she didn’t want to give him any more. 

Input: Bruise. Output: ??? 

“That’s quite unfortunate,” said Palamedes. “You should take better care in the future.” 

Output: _ Bullshit. _

Dulcinea clicked her tongue. Her hand had migrated down to Gideon’s chin, and she tilted Gideon’s face this way and that, examining her like a ripe piece of fruit, one she was ready to sink her teeth into. “That little thing in second period — Harrowhark? — had a bruise today too, the poor dear,” said Dulcinea. She did a fair job of sounding concerned, even though Gideon was fairly certain that Dulcinea would run Harrow over with her wheelchair and make it look like an accident if given the opportunity. At least, that had been one of Gideon’s fantasies for a very, _ very _long time. 

“Did she?” Asked Palamedes lightly. One eyebrow twitched over the rims of his glasses. For Palamedes, this was practically a passion-filled accusation. He was too decent to say anything to Dulcinea, but Gideon was certain he was mentally mapping the spread of her bruise, trying to compare it to the one that he _ had _to have seen on Harrow in their AP history class already. 

“Yes, a nasty one,” said Dulcinea, whose hand was in Gideon’s hair again. 

“Weird,” said Gideon. It was awfully warm out here. Someone else might have chalked it up to embarrassment or guilt or teen hormones, but Gideon was fairly certain it was the flames of Hell licking at her corporal form. Today had been too wild to be anything else but some kind of fucked up descent into the afterlife.

This time when Dulcinea’s finger brushed over the purple of the bruise, Gideon couldn’t keep herself from flinching. “Oh, _ Gideon, _” she murmured piteously, and then leaned forward and pressed her pale pink lips to the violet skin of Gideon’s forehead. 

On second thought, maybe Hell wasn’t so bad. 

* * *

When Gideon _ wasn’t _mobbed in the locker room before practice (a concept that was sexy in theory, less so when in reality she had spent the last two years with these girls and their gross gym socks), she knew something was up. 

Between the main team and the subs, there were nearly twenty girls on the team. Gideon couldn’t even take a piss without it being spread down the grapevine. No matter how many times Judith, their iron-willed captain, snapped at them to keep their heads in the game and focus on practice, gossip streamed through their ranks like water on a prayer wheel. 

The whole team had to have heard about Gideon’s dramatic entrance already. She had been dodging questions about it all day — she had willingly spent half of her lunch period in the library in order to escape the barrage of questions. _ The library. _Where Crux lived.

Even if her team had somehow avoided the maelstrom of gossip that raged through the high school halls, then it was impossible to miss the giant bruise slapped onto her forehead, clearly on display thanks to a borrowed sweatband. Gideon could absolutely _ feel _her teammates, many of whom had never in their lives been accused of being polite, pointedly averting their gaze from the glaring, purple mark on her forehead when they saw her. They were running laps so quietly that it was almost creepy, the running track oddly quiet without the usual breathless banter. 

It took an all out sprint on Gideon's part to match Camilla's jog. When she did, the first thing Cam said to her, breaking neither pace not sweat, was, "I don't want to hear about it." 

She said it at the exact same time that Gideon said, "Nothing happened." _ Said _ was perhaps not as accurate as _ wheezed. _

Camilla side-eyed her. She looked irritatingly serene for someone who was running at a pace that could put a cheetah to shame. Her temples were just barely touched with sweat, her face unflushed despite the inhuman pace. Her dark hair was too short for a proper ponytail, so it had been neatly bisected and pulled into two smaller ones at the base of her neck. On anyone else, it would have looked girlishly cute. Camilla still gave the impression that she _ could _kick someone’s lights in, but would refrain because it was unseemly. 

“Yeah, looks like nothing,” Camilla said, _ metaphorically _kicking Gideon’s lights in. 

“I—”

“I said I don’t want to hear about it.” It was probably a mercy; Gideon could barely get a word in between her frenzied breaths. 

They ran in silence for a couple of moments. As silent as it could be with Gidoen heaving like a dying horse, at least. When she had finally caught enough breath to make out a coherent sentence, Gideon said, “What’s up with everyone?”

Camilla glanced at her coolly from the corner of her eye. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Gideon chalked the sudden ache in her chest up to the running. It was the slightly less embarrassing option. 

* * *

Gideon didn’t know _ what _Camilla had said to the team before practice to get them to keep their mouths shut, but not even the fear of Camilla could stop the whispers when Harrow sat her unhappy ass down on the bleachers. 

“Holy shit, it’s true,” whispered one of her teammates to another, eyes flicking frantically from Gideon to the Harrow-shaped ball of dark energy sitting on the bleachers, “they’re—”

The rest of the team didn’t have time to figure out what they were, because at that exact moment a ball conveniently collided with the back of the girl’s head. The remainder of her sentence was replaced by a colorful expletive. 

“Oops,” said Camilla remorselessly. 

The fact that blood was openly being shed on the practice field apparently meant little when compared to the fact that Gideon had an audience, at least to Judith. The team captain glared at Gideon, her shoulder set in the impeccable posture of an army brat, and said, “No visitors. No distractions.” 

Quite suddenly, Gideon realized that all eyes were on her. She crossed her arms. “What, you think I _ asked _her to come? Do you think I have a death wish? Do you think—”

“_I _ think you came to school in her car this morning.”

Marta’s voice cut through Gideon’s bullshit like a knife. The team’s second in command stood taut as a bowstring behind Judith, her chain raised defiantly. Gideon didn’t know _ what _was going on with the two of them, but Marta was so far up the captain’s ass that it was a miracle she hadn’t found the stick up there. Maybe they were sleeping together. More likely, maybe they were just constructing intricate rituals to, like, tie each other’s shoes and clasp each other’s necklaces and do other weird Puritan shit. Gideon valued her role on the team too much to ask . 

Besides, right now she was too wrapped up in her own alleged sex scandal to worry about Judith and Marta’s. 

“_Technically, _ yes,” hedged Gideon. “But it wasn’t — It was mutually beneficial.” Even though it _ damn well wasn’t. _Gideon had practically concussed Harrow, wiped blood on her bed, and then been a bitch about it. The only person it remotely benefited was Gideon, and that had backfired the second she had stepped onto the school parking lot. 

Just over Marta’s shoulder, Camilla put a palm to her forehead. 

“She needs to leave,” said Judith authoritatively. “Next week’s game is big. We can’t have you messing up because you’re too busy flirting with your girlfriend—”

“Oh, she is _ not _—”

“— to keep your head on straight during practice.” She jabbed a finger in Harrow’s direction. Gideon would have done anything short of sawing Judith’s arm off to make her _ stop pointing _ because Harrow _ could see them _ and _ Gideon wanted to die. _“Go talk to her.”

The fact that Judith thought Gideon was dating someone who would gladly grind her bones into paste and use it to brush her teeth made Gideon suspect Judith was on drugs. The fact that she thought there was any universe in which Harrow would listen to Gideon made her _ know _Judith was on drugs. 

She couldn’t exactly say no, though, so Gideon found herself making the half jog of shame across the field while the rest of her team watched on with the same enthusiasm of an audience at an execution. 

Much like Gideon’s, the bruise on Harrow’s forehead could probably be seen from orbit. It kind of went with her whole goth-girl thing, in a way. Matched her eyeliner and her mean little mouth. Once again, Princess Monstertruck was a splash of color against the otherwise soulless backdrop of Harrow’s lap. 

Harrow did not greet Gideon. Not properly, at least. 

“Someone ought to teach your little captain,” said Harrow, who was probably a good half foot shorter than Judith, “that it’s rude to point.” Her tone of voice implied that she would happily be the one to teach her, and that witchcraft may be involved. After being forced to run for half of practice, Gideon would probably turn a blind eye on that one. 

“What are you doing here?” Gideon blurted. “Are you here to curse me and take my firstborn child?”

“I already have it.” 

And Gideon nearly had a heart attack because _ holy fuck, _ Harrow just made a _ joke. _Probably the first one in her entire life, and Gideon was too busy being stunned to even try to laugh. 

After a beat of awkward silence, Harrow said boredly, “My driveway is not a junkyard, Griddle. What remains of your..._ vehicle _is already halfway decomposed. I won’t allow the rest to happen in front of my house.” 

At any other point, Gideon might have been a little sore, because maybe her Jeep _ was _ a pile of decaying parts roughly joined together by a frame and a prayer, but it was also _ her baby. _Right now, she was more focused on the fact that what goes up must come down. What goes to school in Harrow’s car must come home in Harrow’s car.

The team was going to have a fucking _ field day. _

Harrow waiting to take Gideon home was another thing going in that _ Fuck NO _file in the back of her head, so Gideon didn’t address it. Instead, she said, “My car’s not that bad.”

“Much like your thick skull, it is a biohazard,” Harrow said. Probably fair, considering the blotted purple on her forehead. Her gaze flicked from Gideon to some fixed place behind her, where Gideon’s team was more than likely gawking with mouths open. “If you don’t go back, I think one of them will come over here,” said Harrow with contempt. 

Anyone who did would clearly have piss-poor self preservation skills and would probably deserve to be mauled by an angry Harrow. Gideon’s instinct for self preservation wasn’t that great either, so she said, “Yeah, I’m supposed to be getting rid of you.”

“And clearly, you are excelling with that. As you do with all things,” said Harrow, the sarcasm coming off in thick rivulets. She stood, throwing her book bag over her shoulder. Princess Monstertruck sat crooked loosely in her elbow. “However, I have no desire to witness you lose your few remaining brain cells, so I’m going to the library.”

Just when Gideon thought Harrow was going to storm off in her trademark Harrow fashion, Harrow paused. She looked like someone chewing her own tongue, and then she said, “How was your test?”

Maybe Gideon should start getting used to this weird, somewhat caring Harrow, because if she didn’t, she was going to go short circuit. She practically BSOD’d at that. “Uh, fine, I guess.”

Probably better than fine. Gideon was confident she had gotten at least a B+, maybe even an A. The test had been a breeze. The part after, where Mr. Quinn gently peppered her with questions until Gideon finally conceded it had been from a literal head-on collision with a classmate? Not so much. 

“Well,” said Harrow. “Maybe you aren’t a completely lost cause. If you aren’t in the parking lot by five, I will leave without you.”

With that, she swept back toward the main building, leaving Gideon to jog miserably back to her team. When she saw the smirks on their faces, she wished Harrow had just smashed through the chain link fence of the field and run her over. It would have been less painful.

* * *

By the time Gideon made it to Harrow’s car, there were mercifully fewer people milling about the parking lot than there had been that morning. She had ensured that none of them were her teammates by taking an obnoxiously long post-practice shower. Gideon had spent half a lifetime in that locker room shower stall, washing the scent of Harrow’s shampoo down the drain until her teeth were chattering and her tits were ready to fall off. So what if her skin was cold as fuck and her wet hair was going to give her hypothermia? Gideon didn’t think she could stand to get in Harrow’s car with that particular audience.

In fact, the only audience _ worse _than her teammates was Ianthe Tridentarius. Who happened to be standing at Harrow’s car, leaning over her like some kind of bougie banshee. 

Every gear in Gideon’s head (_Not that there are many of them, _ she could just hear Harrow saying) ground to a halt. 

Gideon couldn’t hear what the two of them were talking about. The lineup for the creep convention, or how to best prepare human flesh for consumption. Either way, Ianthe leaned in close, a perfect, predatory pout carefully crafted on her gaunt face. 

If Corona glittered like diamond, Ianthe gleamed like oil on water. Odious and slick, she glinted attractively in the right light, but something about her turned Gideon’s stomach. Her violet eyes — a wan, sickly imitation of her sister’s amethyst ones — fixed on Harrow like an animal sizing up its prey.

Gideon half expected Ianthe to unhinge her jaw and swallow Harrow whole right then and there — and then Ianthe’s glassy eyes drifted up, and settled unexpectedly on Gideon, half hidden behind someone’s battered, yee-haw truck.

“Uh. Hey.” 

Ianthe stared straight through her. She lifted one, pale hand. Gideon didn’t know was more shocking — the fact that Ianthe _ didn’t, _like, cast a spell on her, or the fact that Harrow did not scream, scratch, bite, or kick when Ianthe rested a hand on her knobby shoulder. 

She dipped her head lower — her noxious, buttery hair nearly dripping onto Harrow’s shoulder — and then casually slipped a hand down, brushing the top of Princess Monstertrucks’ plastic head just hard enough to send her into a series of shrieks. 

Harrow looked _ pissed. _

“_ Tridentarius—” _

Ianthe had already turned from Harrow, no doubt to go climb into whichever ridiculous European sports car her parents had bought for her last birthday. “Sorry, Harry,” she said, and Gideon almost went into cardiac arrest. The only possible reason Ianthe wasn’t bleeding from every orifice for her impunity had to be the fact that Harrow was too busy fussing with a screaming baby to hear. Gideon herself was probably bleeding from her _ ears _at that.

It was easy to forget just how tall Ianthe was; like her sister, she towered over Gideon, especially in those death-trap heels both of the twins preferred. Gideon caught the full brunt of it as Ianthe drifted past her, looking like a model. One of those wraith-like, heroin-chic models from the nineties, but a model nonetheless. 

She gave Gideon a look that would later have Gideon climbing on the floor and checking the space under her bed for monsters, then drifted away across the parking lot. 

Gideon shuffled awkwardly toward Harrow, who seemed completely unshaded by the screaming doll in her arms. Her dark eyes were fixed on Ianthe’s receding form, brows furled together in Harrow-typical scowl.

“Damn, what was she doing? Stealing your lunch money?” 

Harrow turned to look at Gideon on a lag. When she did, her eyes were glassy and her gaze distant — looking at Gideon, but not quite seeing her.

Harrow blinked, hard, and the spell was broken. Her gaze flicked from Giden’s wet hair to her sweatpants in disdain, and then she said, “Something like that,” voice oddly flat. Without preamble, she tossed the baby doll. It made a screaming arc through the air before Gideon caught it. “Get in the car.”

Gideon did as she was told. She buckled the baby doll into one of the back seats, and then folded herself into the cramped front seat of Harrow’s car, feeling distinctly like she was missing something. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you all enjoyed it! This continues to be super fun to write, and your comments and feedback are, as always, loved and appreciated.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you! I hope you are enjoying this as much a I am enjoying writing it! Please feel free to reach out to me or to comment, and keep an eye out for updates!


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